Two Stinsons. One named Katherine, the other named Katharine. Both pioneers in aviation, Katherine as a world-famous aviator, Katharine as an internationally respected aviation engineer, their legacies forever fated to be mingled and conflated with each other. Katherine Stinson (1891-1977), otherwise known as “The Flying Schoolgirl” or “The Queen of the Air”, is, of the two, the individual who has lived most fixedly in our memory. This is virtually unavoidable, because everything about Katherine’s career is made to stick in the mind. Her life is almost anthemic in its sweep and scope, encompassing and exemplifying both the breakneck enthusiasms of the 1900s, and the compound tragedies of the First World War. Unfortunately, because her life was so mythic in scope, it bred a fair amount of mythologizing in the press and later accounts, so getting down to the solid core of truth about her career can be challenging, but we’ll give it a try. She was born in Alabama in 1891, but would list 1893 on her pilot’s license, and would throughout her career weave a web of mystery around her birthdate, using her diminutive size (she was five feet tall and a hundred and one pounds as an adult) to portray herself as younger than she was for advertising purposes. Her mother was the dominant influence of her life, a woman who repeatedly asserted that there was nothing a man could do that a woman couldn’t, an assumption that drove Katherine time and again to demanding, and usually getting, equal opportunities to demonstrate and apply her skills. She learned to drive a car at age fourteen, demonstrating a mechanical skill at operating machinery that would serve her well during the dizzying early years of aviation, where each season seemed to bring new advances in structure and control that aviators had to constantly adapt to in order to keep going faster, higher, and further than their fellow air jockeys. Her first taste of the open air came on August 31, 1911, when she won a ride in a hot air balloon in Kansas City, Missouri. Accounts differ as to whether this experience was undertaken by her after hearing how much money could be made in aviation, or whether her research on an aviation career was inspired by the balloon flight, but the end result was the same - a determination to become a pilot. Initially, this interest was justified to her father as part of a larger plan to become a music teacher. The theory was that, to earn enough money to study piano in Europe, she could fly in air shows and during state fairs. But to do that, she would need training, which was also not cheap, so the family piano was sold to pay for pilot lessons, and hats off to Katherine for somehow convincing her parents that the best way to pursue a career in piano teaching was to sell their piano. Katherine’s first flight in a plane occurred on January 21, 1912. The pilot she had chosen decided to try and frighten his young charge out of a career in aviation by flying at a constant and disconcerting tilt, but far from scaring her, he only made her doubt his competence as an aviator. Seeing that she was not an individual to be driven off by cheap tricks, he leveled the plane on the next run while she took mental notes on the series of handles that controlled the fabric and wood sky creature around her. Securing a long term teacher would take several more months, but in May of 1912 Katherine found Maximillian Theo Liljestrand (1881-1913), better known to history as Max Lillie, the 73rd man in the United States to earn a pilot’s license. The jovial Swede was impressed by Katherine’s confidence and pluck, and agreed to train her, though he would often make fun of her meticulous cleaning and inspection of the planes she planned to fly. As it turned out, her attention to detail meant that, in the next seven years of performing trick aviation all over the world, Katherine never had a major mechanical issue and died in her bed 57 years after her last flight, while Max Lillie died in 1913 at the age of 31 when his plane malfunctioned. Katherine earned her license on July 24, 1912. At that point she had had only four and a half hours of experience in the air, which is literally ten times less than the minimum required amount of air time for a license today, but a not uncommon amount for the era. She received license #148, and was at the time just the fourth woman in the United States to have earned a license. As it happened, by the time she earned her license, Katherine was the only woman left in the skies. Julia Clark, the third licensed woman pilot, had died after an air accident on June 17, 1912, while Harriet Quimby, the first, died less than a month later on July 1 after being thrown from her plane. Mathilde Moisant, the second, had survived a crash in April (the same day the Titanic met its fate), but a week after Quimby’s death, announced she would not attempt to fly again. Katherine did not seem over-fazed by all this tragedy, and had the skies to herself, though in just three months the woman who would come to be her arch rival, Ruth Law (1887-1970), received her own license. For the next seven years, Katherine Stinson balanced her career as one of the pre-eminent aviators of her age with her interest in the Stinson Aviation Company, initially founded by herself and her mother with a view to constructing their own airplanes, but which evolved over time into a pilot school funded by Katherine’s stunt flying, and grounded in her sister Marjorie’s solid teaching instincts. While the school trained dozen of aviators, Katherine was developing new ways to thrill crowds, not only perfecting the loop de loop and nosedives originating with other flyers, but designing her own tricks, such as the “dippy twist loop”, and the use of magnesium flares to perform dramatic tricks at night, as she did in 1914, during which she became the first woman ever to perform at night, and the first human ever to use a plane to do a night time light show. She also invented skywriting as an aviation stunt, performing it for a California show in 1915, spelling “CAL” in the sky for the amazed crowd below, years before both Jack Savage’s and Allen Hardcastle’s skywriting displays which historians usually cite as the First example of aviator skywriting. The press loved “The Flying Schoolgirl” for the quality and daring of her flying, for the optics of a woman who to all appearances seemed like she could still be in high school handling the rough and tumble airplanes of the age, for her quick banter, and her striking air fashions. Hearing from Max Lillie about the superb flying weather available in Texas (particularly in comparison to that of Chicago), she and her family moved their operations there, creating their own airstrip in 1916, now known as Stinson Field, which is the second oldest still functioning civilian airstrip in the nation. By 1916 she was a figure of international renown, and was asked to perform in Japan and China, where she wowed crowds, met with royalty, and inspired women of both nations to imagine a new and more equal future for their daughters. Marjorie and Katherine Returning to the United States after the announcement of its entry into World War I, she undertook a fundraising mission for the Red Cross, flying over a series of towns in the East, “bombing” them with Red Cross leaflets, then landing to collect donations from people who would rush up to the plane to give what they could. In one day, she collected 2 MILLION dollars in donations while also demonstrating her skill at endurance riding, which she would employ to even greater effect six months later. One thing that had been eating away at Katherine since before she left for Japan was Ruth Law’s distance record set in November of 1916. Law had flown for 590 uninterrupted miles, a record not just for a woman pilot, but for any pilot. Katherine was so keen to break it that she almost cancelled her Japan trip but fortunately her brother talked her down from that decision, and so it was not until December of 1917 that Katherine, after her usual meticulous inspection of her craft, lifted off into the California skies in a plane built to her own specifications and design, in an attempt to make the flight from San Diego to San Francisco in one straight shot. Using a map set on a series of rollers so she could advance it as she travelled north, she made the 610 mile trek in nine hours and ten minutes, and at the end had only two gallons of gas left in her tank. At the Presidio, just after Katherine's record-breaking California flight. It was a momentous achievement, which she topped just six months later, setting a new endurance record of ten hours and ten minutes in the air on her solo flight from Chicago to New York. She had nothing left to prove in terms of her skills as an aviator, but what she wanted most was to put them at the disposal of her country. She had previously approached General Pershing during the hectic days of Pancho Villa’s raids with the idea of using her plane to gather intelligence, but was turned down. Having set two separate world records for aviation in the meantime, however, she felt that her chances were good to be accepted as an aviator in the First World War. That was never going to happen, of course, no matter what skill she had. To put a woman deliberately in harm’s way ran against every instinct of military procedure at the time, and she was distinctly and decisively rejected. Undeterred, Katherine got on a boat and enlisted as an ambulance driver in France, driving herself to the point of exhaustion running bodies back and forth between the front and its makeshift hospital system, losing track of the days, grabbing what sleep she could on the road, and utterly ruining her health in the process, developing a case of tuberculosis that would see the end of her flying career on her return to the States. After the war, Katherine spent several years recovering in a sanatorium in New Mexico, but did manage at last to beat the disease, marry, and establish herself successfully in a new career as an architect, designing homes across New Mexico in the pueblo style. As the sun was setting on Katherine’s aviation career, another Stinson halfway across the country was taking her first steps into life. Katharine Stinson was born on September 18, 1917, in North Carolina. She loved fishing and building model airplanes and generally rambling about the family farm. By complete chance, at the age of ten, Katharine was taken up in a plane by Katherine Stinson’s brother Eddie Stinson, who happened to be in Raleigh on business. This was still in the infancy of flight, and Eddie didn’t ask Katharine’s parents for permission, and Eddie was the worry of Katherine and Marjorie for his alcoholism and recklessness (he would die in an air crash in 1932), but fortunately tragedy stayed its hand that night and Katharine left the experience even more enchanted than ever with flight. Five years later, she met another early aviation legend, and her absolute idol, Amelia Earhart, who was in Rayleigh on a Beech-Nut Gum promotional stint. Earhart gave her some important advice, that flying was fun, but that the money and stability was in aeronautical engineering. She took the message to heart, which in North Carolina meant plotting a course for NC State, but upon arriving there she was told that, as a woman, she had to go to the Women’s College at Greensboro first, and could perhaps transfer to State as a junior. Katharine was not deterred, and instead went to Greensboro, took 48 credits in one year to get her freshman and sophomore years over with simultaneously, and then applied to State the following year, where though the professors bridled at her presence as the only woman engineering student on campus and openly stated that they would make life difficult for her, her fellow students were generally highly supportive of her studies, particularly after she proved herself to be a top student, earning the Order of Saint Patrick her senior year. Right out of college, she became the first woman engineer at the Civil Aeronautics Administration, the precursor of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). She was the agency’s go-to expert on safety standards and protocols, where “Call Katy” became the standard mantra for any problem related to aeronautical safety during her thirty-two year tenure there. During the early years she was essentially the only person writing airworthiness directives, often piloting planes herself with known flaws in order to develop procedures for recognizing and repairing them. With the arrival of World War II she was charged with the conversion of airplanes into gliders for pilot training, and then with their re-conversion at war’s close. In 1950, she was one of the driving forces behind the founding of the Society of Women Engineers, becoming its third President in 1953, quintupling the number of members and adding 25 member clubs to the organization during her tenure. The SWE continues to this day, with some 47,000 members spread across 60 global affiliates. Katharine retired in 1973, but was regularly honored by the aerospace industry in the years after her retirement, with NC State naming a street, Katharine Stinson Drive, in her honor in 1997, making up in some degree for the hard time it gave her when she first sought to pursue her aeronautical education there. Katherine passed away in 1977 at the age of 86, and Katharine in 2001 at the age of 83, and though it seems impossible that they never met at any point in their long lives, I haven’t been able to find any pictures or accounts showing that they did, that the Flying Schoolgirl and the safety whiz of Call Katy fame ever had a chance to sit down and talk about the thing they loved best, the pursuit of the sky. But between them, from 1912, when Katherine first took to the air, to 1973, when Katharine left the aeronautical industry, they made the sky a more magical, but also safer, place to be. They showed the wonder and whimsy of flight, but also demonstrated the rigor and care needed to bring people securely back to ground after their dreamy interludes above, and that mix of romanticism and grit charms us still, and ever will. FURTHER READING: There is a lot written about Katherine, not so much about Katharine. Mary Powell’s Queen of the Air (1993) is a fun semi-fictionalized account of her life, while Debra Winegarten’s The Flying Schoolgirl (2000) is filled with some of the most gorgeous archival photos of Stinson’s life that you are ever likely to see. Much harder to find is the 1969 book by John Underwood, The Stinsons, about the whole aeronautical dynasty. I came across Katharine primarily through the pages devoted to her in Margaret Layne’s wonderful Women in Engineering: Pioneers and Trailblazers (2009), and in various articles and tributes written about her towards the end of her life, but no book-length treatment of her life has been written. Yet.

Prior to the arrival of C. Everett Koop (1916-2013) as Surgeon General of the United States in 1982, the position was a relatively low profile affair held by career officers dedicated to the task of gathering data on matters related to public health and suggesting policies to address problems uncovered thereby. In 1964, Surgeon General Luther Terry published a report on the dangers of tobacco, and before him, in 1959, Leroy Burney released an important report on environmental health. This was solid, methodical, non-political work, and as such, it is all but forgotten today, along with the names of the Surgeon Generals who carried it out. This changed with the appointment of Koop, who brought the office, for better and worse, into mainstream public consciousness during the 1980s through his media appearances (he was on an episode of The Golden Girls at one point), books, and controversial opinions about tobacco, abortion, sex education, and the AIDS crisis. His approach brought a prestige and visibility to the position which created in turn a politicization which it has never fully shaken, a fact which defined much of the career of Koop’s successor in the office, Antonia Novello (b. 1944). We celebrate Novello’s becoming Surgeon General in March of 1990 for its historic nature - she was both the first woman and first Hispanic individual to hold the position - but her reason for receiving the offer in the first place was tied less to its historical nature than to the political litmus test that had been developed by Bush’s advisors for Koop’s successor. Koop, though staunchly anti-abortion personally, had refused to toe the Reagan administration’s line when it came to using his position to generate false reports about the psychological damage that abortion caused women. When it came time for George H.W. Bush to select his Surgeon General, he wanted to make sure he had somebody who jibed with his own conservative views, i.e. that abortion should be illegal in all cases except for those involving the potential death of the mother or instances of rape or incest. A number of potential SGs had removed themselves from consideration because of an inability to reconcile themselves with that position, but it fit nicely with the personal philosophy of Novello, setting the stage for the pioneering moment that saw her, the first woman Surgeon General, sworn into the office by Sandra Day O’Connor, the first woman Supreme Court justice, in the White House. What followed was a term in office that showed Novello to be a reasonable, data-driven, and gifted administrator who, if not the fulfillment of all that feminists of the era might have hoped from a woman SG, was at least not the nightmare that the Pro-Choice community feared from her status as a Catholic Republican nominee. Hers was a success rooted in personality traits forged during a youth marred by poor health and inconsistent medical care. Born Antonia Coello in Fajardo, Puerto Rico, in 1944, and raised by her determined mother, who served as one of the region’s key educators for over half a century, the course of her early years was set by a persistent medical condition known as congenital megacolon, in which there is an absence of the nerves controlling the relaxation of the colon, meaning in effect that feces cannot be passed out of the body, and back up in the intestines. For the first eighteen years of her life, Novello had to live with regular sessions that manually removed the feces from her colon, and with the discomfort that it brought as, week after week, her abdomen started bloating from the buildup within her. It was an embarrassing condition, but the first attempt to cure it made things, if anything, worse for Novello, when at the age of eighteen a heart surgeon decided that he had enough natural experience and ability to perform a surgery that would remove a length of her colon and reattach what was left to the rectum. Not only did the surgeon sever one of her fallopian tubes during the procedure, but the reattachment did not take, and for years thereafter Novello had to deal with constant fecal seepage requiring the wearing of diapers that produced an omnipresent and overpowering stench that kept all but the closest friends and colleagues from associating with her socially or professionally. She was brilliant and, thanks to her mother’s influence, deeply driven (she had, in fact, graduated high school at the age of 15), and the suffering she had experienced on account of her condition fueled her with a desire to make a contribution in the field of medicine, but how could she expect to really make something of herself in this field if, wherever she went, she brought with her a cloud of overpowering fecal scent? Help came at last in the form of the Mayo Clinic, where Dr. Markham Anderson approached her medical situation with care and compassion, ordering a fistulogram that uncovered the fact that Novello had been born with two vaginas and two uteri, a condition that had gone totally unnoticed until then. He performed the procedure that removed the secondary vagina and the fistula, and repaired the surgical error which had been making Novello’s life miserable for the previous three years. The individual who emerged from the Mayo Clinic was changed in ways that she had hardly hoped for before, able to partake of regular society and live a life not ringed in on all sides by discomfort and rejection. She graduated medical school on May 29, 1970, two weeks after having married Joe Novello, who was stationed in Puerto Rico with the Navy. He encouraged her to specialize in pediatrics instead of the surgery she had initially been drawn towards, while he switched career paths from ophthalmology to psychiatry. New specialties in hand, the couple moved to Michigan, where Antonia pursued her internship at the University of Michigan Medical School because that institution was the best place for Joe to continue his education in psychiatry. She was placed initially at Wayne County hospital, where the other interns called her “Chiquita Banana” on account of her Puerto Rican accent, but her fierce determination to learn pediatrics and to spare nothing of herself in providing for patient care soon won the admiration of her colleagues and superiors, garnering her the Intern of the Year award. The first years in a medical career are always the most trying, and Novello’s situation was not aided by Joe’s serial philandering or expectations that, no matter how hard or long she worked, responsibility for domestic maintenance and routine was to rest entirely on her shoulders, while he maintained complete financial control of their situation, all of her checks going directly to him, while she was not even permitted a credit card in her own name. The death of an aunt from kidney disease prompted her to choose nephrology as her pediatric specialty, which she pursued at Georgetown University from 1973 to 1976, but after splitting up with then moving back together with Joe, who did not discernibly change in the interim, she was feeling personally adrift and professionally rudderless. Enter a man in a white uniform. He showed up every Wednesday to work at the pediatrics ward where Antonia was stationed, and she asked him about what he did. He said he was an employee of the Public Health Service, and after learning more about it, she decided it was exactly the sort of environment where she could thrive - an agency devoted to public medical service, but with the rigor and structure of the military. She applied for a position, but was very nearly turned down when she disclosed that she and her husband had been seeing a couple’s counselor. This disqualified her in the eyes of the PHS at the time, because it meant she had seen a psychologist for a personal issue, and was therefore unfit to serve. Characteristically, she fought the decision, arguing that this view of counseling as evidence of mental unbalance was arcane and unbecoming of an organization purportedly devoted to pursuing the best practices for public health. The decision was overturned, and in 1979 she began her career with the PHS, forming a particularly close working relationship with Republican Senator Orrin Hatch (1934-2022). Today, those who remember Hatch at all remember him for the Hatch Amendment which attempted to overturn Roe v. Wade by changing the Constitution, and for the 1994 act that removed all regulation from the dietary supplement industry, creating a myriad of problems today as dangerous drugs bypass all regulation by calling themselves Dietary Supplements, but he was in fact something more than a reactionary crackpot, serving as chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Labor, and Education from 1981 to 1987. It was in this capacity that his work crossed Novello’s, as they lobbied for cigarette labeling that addressed the dangers of tobacco for women and children, and crafted the 1984 National Organ Transplant Act, which created a national organ registry and criminalized the private organ transplant industry. These years also saw Novello working on issues of AIDS research with the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, focusing particularly on pediatric AIDS. Republicans’ reaction to the original outbreak of AIDS in the early 1980s had been widely criticized for its sluggishness in responding to a disease that befell a portion of society they held in contempt, but Novello was not possessed of their instinctual aversion to the gay community, and her work with AIDS activists throughout the 1980s and early 1990s was characterized by mutual respect. Novello’s work in pediatric AIDS and her productive working relationship with Senator Hatch, combined with her passing of the Bush administration’s abortion litmus test, put her on the path towards Surgeon General, a position she assumed on March 9, 1990. As a pediatrician, one of the major planks of Novello’s time in office was devoted to children’s health issues, including a campaign against the use of cartoon characters like Joe Camel in cigarette advertisements, the promotion of childhood immunization, and a campaign to move the fortified wine cooler drink Cisco (known colloquially as “liquid crack”) out of supermarkets’ easily accessible refrigerated sections and back behind the counter where adolescents couldn’t as easily obtain it, which was itself part of a larger campaign against underage drinking that spawned seven official SG reports. Generally lauded for her AIDS and pediatric public health work, Novello came under intent criticism for her stance on abortion, and no policy more so than the “gag rule” she instituted which denied federal funding to any programs, such as family planning, which discussed abortion with patients. This policy, along with similar legislation passed throughout the 1980s by the Republican Congress, served as a template for the Trump administration’s Global Gag Rule of 2017 which threatened to revoke hundreds of millions of dollars of global health funding for organizations which provided or even advocated for abortion services. The policy goes unmentioned in Novello’s memoirs, where the only real references to abortion are limited to outlining the reasons she had for closing down a clinic that did not meet health standards, and the relating of a speech during which her reasonableness impressed abortion activists who had turned out to protest. With the victory of Bill Clinton in the election of 1992, it was a foregone conclusion that Novello would be replaced as Surgeon General. Previously, however, it had been a rule of thumb that SGs would be allowed to serve out their four year term, even if these extended into a new presidency. That courtesy was not extended to Novello, who found herself removed from her position in 1993, to be succeeded by Joycelyn Elders, who only served for one and a third years before being drummed out in turn. Where does one go after having served as the Nation’s Physician? Koop’s post-SG career featured a revolving door of questionable business decisions that tarnished his legacy, but Novello showed a sure instinct for choosing positions that allowed her to continue working on important public health issues. Working for UNICEF, she participated in the global campaign to iodize salt which saw rapid adoption in both China and India, as well as in other programs to bring child’s health services to underdeveloped countries. 1999 saw her appointed Commissioner of the New York State Department of Health, a position she held until 2006. She earned enemies throughout this time through her steadfast refusal to give special treatment to hospitals or organizations which were politically important, but which ran facilities that did not meet health standards. She dismissed surgeons who were shown to be negligent in their duties, and continued to underscore the importance of childhood vaccination. Her most dramatic moment in office, however, came with the attacks of September 11, 2001, when she spearheaded medical services for the population affected by the destruction of the Twin Towers, using her old SG contacts to bring in emergency services, particularly military nurses trained in burn treatment procedures. Novello’s career as Commissioner ended on a series of frustrations, as members of her staff conspired to produce testimonies about mal-administration that ultimately led to Novello’s felony conviction in 2009. For her part, Novello has steadfastly denied any malicious wrong-doing, saying at most that she was guilty of signing documents handed to her by her staff too casually, and that the charges against her were primarily the result of hurt feelings engendered by her refusal to grant special favors to the politically well-connected. Gathering of living Surgeon Generals organized by Novello. Novello’s career did not end there, however. She was an active force during the relief efforts after Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico in 2017, and again after the earthquake of 2020. During the Covid-19 outbreak, she waded once more into the fray to do battle in the name of sane health policy as a steady voice of reason calmly advocating for masking protocols, public distancing, and the efficacy of vaccines. A hundred years hence, we will continue to remember the name of Antonia Novello as the first woman Surgeon General of what used to be the United States, because we are, as a civilization, mostly decent at remembering People Who Did Something First. But it is my hope that, in addition to the bare fact of having been the first to hold her office, those future generations will also remember what she did both in that office, and in the stretching years before and after it - bringing empathy and education to the fight against AIDS, reining in tobacco and alcohol companies in their attempts to hook children on their products, standardizing donor organ procedures, giving the world population reliable access to iodine sources, and using her knowledge of government to get resources to people who needed them most during moments of natural and man-made crisis. She did not overcome every prejudice of her era, but then again who does? She pushed past what limitations of tradition and upbringing she could, aided by her dedication to research and her fundamental sense of empathy, and achieved a truly global amount of good in the process, while creating an example that has stood for four decades now as a source of inspiration to Puerto Rican girls and women, allowing them to believe that though their land is still somehow not a state, they might nonetheless someday hold and serve with distinction in the highest offices of the nation. FURTHER READING: As you can gather from the above, Novello’s memoirs, Duty Calls (2024) is an at times fascinating, at times frustrating, read. Her accounts of her youth, and the two decades of misery she endured at the hands of her medical condition and the botched first surgery to remedy it, are not only interesting from a medical perspective, but provide insights into small town life in 1950s Puerto Rico that one doesn’t often get to read about. Once the book moves to her more political years, there are frustrating omissions which we talked about, which then trigger suspicions that we are also not being told everything we should about the accusations brought by the Albany Five which brought her down in 2009. At the end of the day, it’s something that simply Needs to be read - both for its inherent historical value, and in the hope that it will encourage more women medical trailblazers to put their careers to paper, so, yeah, grab a copy!

Sometimes, science goes pfft.              A promising line of investigation is begun, resources are marshalled, research is conducted, and at the end of it all, in spite of a mass of cleverness and a wealth of honorable intentions, what you are left with is decades of data that sum to a shrug. Results inconclusive. Better luck next life.             The question, then, for us as science history enthusiasts, is what to do with the individuals who, through no fault of their own, and following to the letter the rules of scientific inquiry as they knew them in their time, ended up backing the wrong horse. Personally, I find that these blind alleys are not only fascinating, but tell us important things about how science confronts its wrong turns and adjusts its practices and expectations in the face of them, so I will go on giving these stories a critical but sympathetic home, and if there ever were a branch of investigation requiring both criticism and sympathy, it is that of parapsychology as it evolved over the course of the 1930s through 1970s, as overseen by the spousal team of Joseph and Louisa Rhine.             To say it at the outset, all of the studies we’ll be talking about in what follows have had massive problems with replicability, and some of the figures at the center of our tale were later revealed to be outright charlatans, but there is nothing to suggest that Louisa E. Rhine (1891-1983) was anything but scrupulously honest in her studies and completely genuine in her belief in the reality of the phenomena she was investigating, and the means by which she and her team attempted to separate out and measure different psi phenomena represent a blunderbuss of cleverness no less imposing for being in the service of ideas that turned out to be incorrect.            Parapsychology as a field of scientific inquiry can traditionally be traced back to the 1870s, and particularly to the efforts of the British National Association of Spiritualists’ Scientific Research Committee, as spearheaded by William Henry Harrison. They sought to bring experimental rigor to the mania for spiritualism which had been sweeping Victorian England, but, as Harrison was to find out, the Spiritualist movement was not always particularly keen to hear results that contradicted its view of the afterlife and our ability to communicate with those who have passed beyond the mortal veil.              What was needed was an organization which put research at the center of its efforts to probe the murkier questions of what capacities humans might have beyond the ordinary, and in 1882 the Society for Psychical Research was formed (and remains in operation, in case you want to pop by) to gather information about psychical occurrences, with a particular focus on compiling cases of telepathy, picking a few hundred of the best documented as the core of their 1886 book with the absolutely wonderful title of Phantasms of the Living.              As intriguing as the book was, however, it was still fundamentally a collection of stories, easily doubted by those inclined to do so, and soon the Society decided it needed to develop an experimental approach to psychical research that would make evidence for parapsychology something more than an anecdotal affair. The question was, how could one do that? How do you prove the existence of psychic powers in a manner that could stand up to all reasonable scrutiny? The Society made important early contributions to designing experiments with responsible controls that generated data which could determine if psychic phenomena were achieving better-than-chance results, but it was to be at Duke University, as guided by the Rhines, that the intricacies of psychical research were well and truly plumbed.             Louisa Rhine was born in 1891 in New York, to an orchardist Mennonite father who was likely the source of an early love of plants that saw her studying botany at the University of Chicago in the late 1910s. At this department, she worked with Joseph Banks Rhine, four years her junior, and an acquaintance of hers since his family rented a farm from her father in 1911. The couple shared a love of books, plants, and religious speculation, and after his return from the Marines they married in 1920, remaining at the University of Chicago as Joseph mopped up his Masters (1923) and PhD (1925) in botany there (Louisa had earned those same degrees in 1921 and 1923). The true course of their joint life together, however, came not from a photosynthetic being, but a lecture given in 1922 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle on the scientific evidence for communication with the dead.             Mediums were very much in fashion in the United States in the early 1920s, so much so that Harry Houdini devoted much of his career during that era to unmasking the frauds portraying themselves as conduits with The Beyond. In spite of these high profile debunkings, the Rhines remained deeply enthused by the experiments described by Doyle, and those that had been carried out by the SPR and other researchers on the continent. It was not long before Joseph, and through him Louisa, found their way into the orbit of William McDougall, who had been president of the SPR in 1920, and was in that same year recruited to fill William James’s old seat at Harvard’s psychology department.  The Duke University Parapsychology Department             In 1927, McDougall went to Duke University, and the Rhines joined him there, to establish in 1930 a university-based department of parapsychological research that would serve for the next three decades as the nerve center of global PSI investigation, receiving its own dedicated building in 1935. It did not take long for the team to realize the magnitude of the task they had undertaken, and here is where things get fun from an experimental design point of view. Let us say, just for now, that you believe in the possibility of Precognition (the ability to see things before they happen), Telepathy (the ability to read somebody’s mind at a distance), and Clairvoyance (the ability to “see” objects at a distance) - how on Earth do you design experiments that disentangle those separate abilities?              One of the early challenges Rhine described in one of her many books about Psi described how the team sought to disambiguate telepathy and clairvoyance. One of the ways they developed of testing clairvoyance was something familiar to anybody who has watched Ghostbusters - a researcher draws cards containing one of five symbols from a deck, and asks the test subject to attempt to sense which card was pulled, tallying the results at the end to see if they performed significantly better than chance. And that works great, unless you put Telepathy on the table as a possible influence as well, in which case you don’t know if a subject got the answer right because they remotely viewed the card, or because they read the mind of the researcher who saw the card. Are they clairvoyant or telepathic? But wait, what if they are a precog? What if they received prior information about the event through that ability, and were simply accessing that knowledge?              The next decades were dedicated to using an ever refined set of experimental techniques to get at the bottom of just these questions - finding out ways to keep track of randomized cards and lists of words in such a way that they never crossed the path and notice of a human whose mind could be read to establish true clairvoyance, and contrariwise creating systems whereby randomization could be generated in lists kept purely in the memory of the experimenters, never written down, to ensure that a reading was an instance of telepathy and not clairvoyance.              My favorite experiment of these years, by the by, was one done by a member of the team before they joined the Lab. He used the decay of a radioactive isotope as the random trigger for a heat lamp, and placed that lamp in a freezing cold barn with the family cat. Over a series of trials, what he found was that the lamp was on a significantly longer time than it should have been from the random triggering of the isotope. The conclusion was, of course, inescapable. The cat, who enjoyed the heat from the lamp on a cold day, unconsciously used its powers of psychokinesis to keep the lamp from shutting off as often as it should have.        This experiment was of a piece with the other experiments in animal psychokinesis and precognition carried out by the Duke Lab in the decades to come which summed, with the human experiments in telepathy and clairvoyance, to a conclusion that “Psi” abilities (an umbrella term for all parapsychological events and capacities) are far more commonly distributed than is generally believed, though some possess more reliable powers than others. Louisa’s role in particular centered on the collection of case histories. As the department’s existence became more widely known, individuals the world over inundated it with tales of their own Psi experiences - premonitions, prophetic dreams, Ouija experiences, anything that had happened to them which others wouldn’t believe but which, they hoped, the sympathetic folks at Duke University might.  The Rhines             Her goal with this collection wasn’t to minutely check each story for factuality, but to compile them in a search for patterns of reported phenomena that could then be scientifically tested in the department’s laboratory. These stories would also leaven the books she began to author once she and JB established the Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man in 1962, which contained the Institute of Parapsychology, which carried on the research begun at Duke three decades before. Louisa edited the Journal of Parapsychology and published a series of books for specialists and general readers that became core texts of the field: Hidden Channels of the Mind (1961), Manual for Introductory Experiments in Parapsychology (1966), Psi: What Is It? (1975), and The Invisible Picture (1981).              For six decades, then, Louisa Rhine was at the heart of what she and her colleagues believed was a deeply credible endeavor to use scientific principles to investigate the most important question possible: What is the nature of life? Are we purely physical creatures, or is there something beyond all of that? She was the interface of this effort with the larger world, funneling the dizzying variety of reported parapsychological events into a program that could be measured, tested, and analyzed. In 1980, the year JB died, her career came full circle as she assumed the presidency of the very Society for Psychical Research which had first paved the way for psychical investigations a century before.              Rhine passed away in 1983. She had weathered much in the last decade of her life. In 1973 James Randi published The Magic of Uri Geller, which revealed the stage magic that one of Rhine’s regular exemplars of psychokinetic abilities employed to pull off his purported psi powers, and in 1982 he struck again with Flim-Flam!, subtitled “The Truth About Unicorns, Parapsychology, and Other Delusions” which put parapsychology front and center of his skeptical inquiry. In the meantime, Psi research continued to have its recurrent problems with reproducibility, and larger problems with more popular forms of New Age belief emerging in the 1980s which damaged the movement by association. Today, things largely remain where they were when the Rhines began their investigations almost a century ago – the Institute they began, now called the Rhine Research Center, soldiers on, as does the Society for Psychical Research, but every year adds another layer of suspicion that, if something tangible and repeatable is to be found, surely it would have been found by now.             What, then, do we make of Rhine’s legacy, and how do we tell her story? She was motivated by questions as deep and penetrating as any motivating the scientists of the standard pantheon, and in the absence of an established set of guidelines for investigating phenomena that lay potentially vastly outside of those traditionally probed by research, she plotted a sensible course forward based on adaptations of the best practices she had at hand. This was scientific research, and belongs here in the long story of natural investigation, even if it was all doomed to ultimate failure. As that other great traverser of the unknown, Captain Jean-Luc Picard, once said, “It is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. That is not weakness, that is life.”   FURTHER READING: All of Rhine’s books are worth reading for the insight they provide into a fascinating side branch of the scientific story. They read like miniature mysteries, where you as the reader follow along with the researchers as they attempt to determine how to measure things that nobody has ever tried to measure before, while keeping out influences that nobody before had sought to keep out, all spiced by letters from ordinary citizens of the globe tentatively revealing secrets they have kept for years about paranormal things they perceive as having happened to them.

At the height of the siege of Vicksburg during the American Civil War, Emily Parsons (1824-1880) acted as the tireless supervisor of nurses at the Benton Barracks Hospital, where thousands of the war’s injured were sent for treatment after their long and physically harrowing journey up the Mississippi. Reading the letters she sent home during this time, one gets a glimpse into the demands of the position - the organizing of individualized care for a constantly shifting roster of wounded men, the training of new nursing staff, the patrolling of the wards, the writing of reports, the oversight of the physical space and the resources required to maintain it, and the communication with families, all falling on the shoulders of one individual.  Performing these duties with the level of attentiveness and admiration recognized by her superiors would have been enough to keep her in our memories on its own, but Parsons did all of it while overcoming a myriad of physical difficulties of long standing, on top of the persistent attacks from wartime diseases that repeatedly laid her low, only to see her rise and return to duty with a steadfastness that beggars belief.  She was born in 1824 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father was a professor at Harvard. At the age of five, she “ran a pair of scissors through the pupil of her right eye” in the vivid words of her father, tearing the lens and robbing it entirely of sight, causing her left eye, in trying to compensate, to significantly weaken in sharpness as well. Two years later, at the age of seven, she contracted scarlet fever, which rendered her totally deaf, and though the effects lessened with time, as an adult she could only fully comprehend spoken language when it was directed purposefully at her, but could not participate in larger general conversations.  Then, at twenty-five years of age she injured her ankle, snapping some of the tendons in a way that never healed, and left her in persistent pain when standing or walking for long periods of time. Outside of these details, we know little of her early years except for her father’s statements that, from her earliest days, she was characterized by her energy, singleness of purpose, and desire to be of use to others. She was the eldest of seven siblings, in a distinguished house that provided for her without the need to work, in an era when higher education for women was distinctly limited (Elizabeth Blackwell’s New York Infirmary did not open until 1857, and Clemence Lozier’s New York Medical College not until 1863), and so she could have expected a lifetime of social organizing to be the summit of her engagement with the outside world, but the arrival of the Civil War in 1861 fired her with the need to be Of Use. Her father resisted the idea initially, worrying about how her health would hold up under the strain of practicing war medicine, but she was insistent, and he ultimately relented. She had no medical training at that point, and so took up a position as a volunteer nurse at Boston’s Massachusetts Hospital, learning by day and returning home to sleep, building up the experience base that would see her, in two years’ time, running the nursing services of one of the western theater’s largest army hospitals.  By October of 1862 she was ready for service, and left home on the 15th for Fort Schuyler Hospital in New York, pitching out on her own in a brand new profession, arriving on the 21st to take up her post as matron of Ward 6, with 48 men and four attendants in her charge. Her work, both organizing regular patient care, and attending surgical procedures, was deemed excellent, but in December her health broke down, compelling her to recover at a friend’s house in New York while the military and medical professionals she had worked with expressed a keen desire for her to return to service once she recovered. Ultimately they decided she would be of most use at Lawson Hospital, a sprawling military hospital in St. Louis that had no trained nurses and was desperate for somebody to oversee operations there. After just three weeks of rest and recovery, Parsons struck out for the new posting, confident that her father would accede to her desire to continue in medicine in spite of the health lapse it seemed to have occasioned.  Professor Parsons did have reservations - St. Louis was such a distance, and the new job seemed to bring even more responsibility than the last - but he trusted his daughter and wanted her to live a life that she thought of as worthwhile, and gave his belated blessing to the venture. She was only at Lawson a few weeks, however, before a more urgent summons came to her, to serve as a nurse aboard a military medical transport as it made its way down the Mississippi to Vicksburg, where the great siege that would secure the river for the Union and with it the western theater of the war, was to begin in a couple of months’ time. Though her ship sailed under the yellow flag of a medical non-combatant, it was fired at by Confederate forces on a number of occasions, which Parsons described as primarily exciting rather than frightening.  The trip exposed Parsons directly to the war as it was being carried out, and to the Southern civilization that she had previously known only through newspapers and rumor, but she didn’t have much time to ruminate on all of this, as shortly after the return leg of the expedition she caught malaria, surviving thanks primarily to the kind and devoted attentions of new acquaintances in St. Louis. At this point, anyone would have forgiven her for returning home and enjoying some respite, comforted in the knowledge that she had done more than anyone could have asked of her, but of course that is not what she did, and no sooner was she back on her feet from her attack of malaria than she was seeking her next medical posting. This was to be at Benton Barracks Hospital, where she arrived in April of 1863 and was made head of nursing, responsible for the care of some two thousand patients. Hard of hearing, with limited vision, recently recovered from malaria, and fighting through the pain that came with a job that was spent primarily on her feet, she took up this position with her accustomed zeal and efficiency, earning praise for the cleanliness and organization of her wards. In June she noted the sub-par condition of the erysipelas wards that were not part of her jurisdiction, and resolved to make improvements anyway. Erysipelas is a relatively rare disease today, treatable through antibiotics, but in the 19th century it was regarded with horror on account of its pronounced outward presentation (interesting fact: John Wilkes Booth was an erysipelas sufferer, as were John Stuart Mill and Richard Wagner), and at Benton nurses were known to avoid the erysipelas ward altogether until Parsons made it her business to personally clean the ward, whitewash the walls, and arrange for regular nursing care for the facility.  Meanwhile, as the war progressed and the siege of Vicksburg grew more intense, Benton received increasingly high numbers of Black soldiers from the front, and Parsons flew to the task of organizing care for them, personally tending to the wards while she was training up a dedicated corps of Black women who wanted to serve as nurses at Benton, and even going so far as to advocate with the main kitchen to prepare special meals that were being requested of those soldiers and nurses as being reminders of home, such as corn bread in place of the regular flour bread. She listened to the stories of these soldiers about what life was like for them in the South, and was horrified at what they had seen and undergone, redoubling her efforts to give them the exact same standard of care as was being given to the white soldiers. Unfortunately for Parsons, and those in her care, malaria is not a disease that is had once and then disappears forever. After a first attack is beaten down, it can hide in the body, multiply, and re-emerge for fresh attacks upon its host, and Parsons would weather a second outbreak in late 1863, from which she recovered and predictably returned to duty at Benton, and then yet another in the summer of 1864, which was sufficiently severe that even she was convinced of the need to return home for recovery, arriving in August of 1864.  This was the end of Parsons’s direct engagement with war nursing. The fall of Vicksburg in July of 1863 had brought with it a gradual shift in Benton’s responsibilities as it shifted from war hospital to refugee center and experienced a consequent downsizing of medical staff. Parsons continued to support the displaced Black population there from afar, sending seeds and other goods to allow them to start a new life, but with the closing of the war her sights shifted to a new project - the creation of a hospital in Cambridge. She found it incredible that a city that was such an intellectual hub of the nation had to send its sick to other cities for treatment, and devoted herself in the post-war years to the raising of money and resources to create a hospital for women and children in Cambridge that would provide for the needs of the poor.  Funeral Plot #608 at Mt. Auburn Cemetery, the final resting place of Emily Parsons. She opened her first hospital in May of 1867, which had to close its doors after a year when the building proprietor refused to renew the lease. Her second hospital opened in December of 1869 and was supported by grants from the city, allowing it to last until 1872 when funding issues again drove it to close. Its example, however, convinced residents of the need to maintain such an institution in their midst, with a more secure financial basis. Parsons lived long enough to see that efforts to resurrect her Cambridge Hospital were promisingly underway, but passed away in 1880 of a stroke, six years before the opening of what is today known as Mt. Auburn Hospital, the direct descendant of her early efforts, and benefactor of the resolve that, in 1861, caused a woman with no medical experience to seek out training and strike out on her own to do whatever she could with the strength that she had, to ease the suffering of others. FURTHER READING: Fearless Purpose , a collection of Parsons’s nursing letters from 1862 through 1864, was published by her father after her death and marks one of the handful of original sources we have for what day-to-day life was like for a war nurse during the American Civil War. Parsons shines through the pages as a devoted, effective, and conscientious individual who is doing great things but who has no ego whatsoever about the institutions and practices being molded by her hands.

After a life spent studying our closest relatives, and arguing passionately for their protection and that of the wider planet of which they are a part, Jane Goodall (1934-2025) by the end of her life enjoyed a deserved and virtually universal acclaim. The road to that pinnacle of public esteem, however, was anything but certain. Her childhood was a prolonged yet curious idyll. Calling herself the Red Admiral, she organized her friends into a makeshift nature enthusiast group, tromping all about, identifying trees and birds, learning how to observe wildlife, and raising money for the care of old or injured animals. She was the grand ringleader of life, and brought everybody into the universe of her own amusements, making everything Fun through her inexhaustible energy and enthusiasm. She was, in addition, a voracious reader, and particularly loved the charming universe of Hugh Lofting's Dr. Dolittle, and the exciting action of Edgar Rice Burroughs's Tarzan. She dreamt of life in Africa, and of becoming a great animal expert, who walked among the beasts and was accepted as one of them. To go to Africa was her consuming and romantic dream. While her family was supportive as far as they could be, there was nonetheless the grim specter of Reality to be dealt with. Reality said that girls who graduated from high school did not head into the wilds of Africa to become modern day John Dolittles. It demanded that, if they really must have a profession, it was to be that of nurse, teacher, or secretary. And so, to secretarial school Jane went, learning shorthand and typing, eventually picking up odd work at a film studio while waiting for something grander to come along. Something Grander made its eventual appearance in the form of an invitation from a friend in Africa to visit for a few weeks - a friendly trip, a quick dash, and then back at the exciting world of cross referencing video clips. Such might have been the official plan, but Jane Goodall was a woman in Africa interested in studying animals, and anthropologist Louis Leakey was a man in Africa interested in women generally, and women interested in animals particularly, and so it was perhaps inevitable that the two would meet, and go on to form a working partnership that would last for the next decade and a half which rewrote the meaning of humanity. Taken up initially as a secretary, politely but firmly refusing Louis's attempts to make her into his nth mistress, Jane proved herself so capable that Louis saw her as a natural candidate to attempt what his previous mistress had failed to achieve - a long term study of the chimpanzees around Lake Tanganyika to begin in 1960. Until Jane Goodall, nobody had had any good fortune in observing the behavior of wild chimpanzees. The animals were skittish around humans, and tended to swiftly disappear at the first appearance of one. Some naturalists had tried building artificial hides from which to observe the chimps, but the clever creatures invariably discovered them and vanished. One researcher thought it would be a brilliant idea to set a circular fire to drive the chimps into an area where they might be observed. It was not a great success. Thus, the chimp literature preceding Goodall consisted of a collection of half-observations, and long catalogues of things that Didn't Work. Leakey picked Goodall not just because she was tough and organized, but because she hadn't gone to college, and therefore could approach the problem of observing chimpanzees in a fresh fashion, unencumbered by orthodox solutions. Her solution was a refreshing blend of patience, theater, and psychological subtlety. Rather than trying to cleverly hide from the chimps, or force them into an observable situation, she walked out into the forest, day after day, and pretended to be totally uninterested in what they were doing. She made herself another indifferent forest dweller, as little of a threat as a passing bird going about its business. She let the chimps acclimate themselves to her presence, and over months and months of excruciating patience and frustrated observation from a distance, she was at last rewarded when an old chimp she had named David Greybeard appeared to accept her as a neutral presence, letting her approach and observe so long as she played by the chimp's rules. As it turned out, those rules were far more complicated than anything anybody had anticipated. It was Goodall's greatest gift to bring to the world, not particular and novel observed behaviors of the chimps (though those were fascinating, as we'll see), but the grand idea of the chimpanzee's emotional and social profundity, their pure individuality, which mirrors that of humanity so closely. For all of those dearly bought successes, however, the first year of observation was fraught with logistic peril. Unable to take intriguing photos, or initially to record anything but the most fleeting of long distance glimpses, it appeared that her mission might go the way of its predecessors, a noble attempt that brought nothing concrete and new to our knowledge of these animals. To get more funding, Leakey needed new results, and those were long in coming. Just as prospects seemed most grim, however, the chimpanzees began to unveil their world. Goodall observed them eating meat, and eventually the grizzly hunting behavior that went with it, overturning a long established theory as to their essentially vegetarian nature. And soon after that, she discovered their use of tools to solve problems. Using long twigs, the chimps raided termite caves, collecting the delicious protein sources on the swirled twig and then licking it clean to start again. Leakey was ecstatic, telling his backers that Goodall had revolutionized what it meant to be human, and National Geographic, swept up in the impressive results, agreed to further generous funding in exchange for the rights to publish a richly illustrated account of her work. Goodall, financially secure for the moment, honed in on understanding the chimps around her as individuals. There was Flo, the veteran mother, whose child, Flint, never quite grew up, so psychologically dependent on his mother that, when she finally passed away in 1972, he soon followed, refusing to eat, gloomily revisiting his mother's favorite spots. Mike, whose ingenuity with fashioning intimidating props from the materials around him allowed him to rise to the level of alpha male in spite of his unimpressive strength and stature. Mr. McGregor, who contracted polio which paralyzed his legs, forcing this once proud ape to drag himself along the ground pathetically as the other chimps shunned and abused him. The complexity of these individuals' social interactions, their distinctly personal ways of dealing with loss, status, relatives, and disease, was cemented in the popular imagination by Goodall's In the Shadow of Man , a best-seller that recounted her first decade of chimp research and the stories of the individual chimps she had come to know, and contained a plea to recognize these creatures as our noble and emotionally identifiable relatives, who need our informed protection. As the success of the Gombe Stream Research Center grew, so did the demands on Goodall's time. Married to the photographer Hugo van Lawick in 1964, much of the latter part of that decade was consumed in following him on his research and photography missions to support his first book, Innocent Killers , about the hyenas, jackals, and wild dogs of the Serengeti. As it turned out, she had to write considerable quantities of that book during a time when she was supposed to be writing her own scientific work summarizing the results of her chimpanzee research. A son was born in 1967, nicknamed Grublin, who grew up chasing after hyenas with dad in the Land Rover and getting bitten by chimpanzees with mom on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Between raising her son, supporting Hugo's book and research, scrambling for assistants and funding for Gombe, and writing her own articles for National Geographic and long-promised books, there was little time to actually observe her chimps, a role that fell to a string of temporary helpers until finally, with the aid of Stanford University's David Hamburg, she was able to remain as a semi-permanent resident of Gombe, the grand coordinator of a dozen students pursuing research on chimpanzees, baboons, birds, and insects, transforming the once drowsy two-women-and-a-tent organization of 1960 into the thriving, world-class research station of the 1970s. There would be tragedy to come. Her first marriage ended in 1974 by Hugo's continuing professional jealousy, her second in 1980 by cancer. The government of Tanzania was always within a hair's breadth of shutting her operation down. Other primate researchers criticized her heavily for her unscientific approach to field work, from the naming of the chimps to the use of provisioning stations (Goodall had set these up initially to act as artificial "fruiting trees" which would allow close observation of chimp feeding behavior, but once word got out along the primate grapevine, the provisioning stations attracted dozens of chimps and baboons on a daily basis, leading to an unnatural, dangerous chaos that would be corrected with Goodall's return as resident scientific director). However, behind the tragedy and struggle, there was greater success. Through the Jane Goodall Institute and the Roots to Shoots program, primate research was placed on a steady financial level, and tens of thousands of youths have had opportunities to learn about wildlife conservation and education. Goodall's speaking engagements, personal vegetarianism, and willingness to speak to the media have all kept the emotional depth of our furrier cousins resonating in our collective consciousness, allowing for the flowering of conservation efforts world-wide in the last thirty years. Jane Goodall at the time of her passing in 2025 was deeply loved the world over, yes. She dedicated her life to the frustrating task of allowing the voiceless to speak, and getting the powerful to listen. It was the work of love, and it continues now, buoyed by her example, and carried forth by the millions she inspired with her courage and compassion. FURTHER READING: Unlike with many of our featured heroes, there is no shortage of work about and by Jane Goodall. Dale Peterson's recent(ish) (2008) Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man is magnificent in all ways. It is also about 700 pages long, so there's a commitment there. If you don't need to know every graduate student who ever spent a few weeks at Gombe, and like pictures, a fun and slim introductory option is Jim Ottaviani's Primates: The Fearless Science of Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Birute Galdikas . It's a graphic novel about these three pioneers in primate field work that takes all of forty five minutes to read, and is a great gift for any aspiring young biologist you may know! In the Shadow of Man, Goodall's first mass-market popular account of her research, is also readily available, and a great entry point to her later works. This piece was originally published as the 26th column of the Women In Science series, in 2015.

By 1971, when a 24 year old anthropology student by the name of Biruté Galdikas (1946-2026) set foot in the wilds of Borneo to study the largely unknown behavior and social structure of wild orangutans, field primatology was entering its second decade of Outsider triumph.  Anthropologist Louis Leakey had gambled twice, with Jane Goodall in 1960, and again with Dian Fossey in 1966, on the premise that women inexperienced in the rigid and restrictive methods of academic fieldwork might uncover more about animal behavior than the by-the-book products of university thinking.  The work done by Goodall and Fossey in the field went beyond Leakey's wildest notions of success, as Goodall documented tool use and meat consumption among chimpanzees while Fossey's habituation techniques with gorillas allowed for unprecedented proximity to their complex social life.   Could lightning possibly strike thrice? The odds weren't great - orangutans presented notoriously great obstacles to observation not encountered with the other great apes.  As opposed to chimpanzees and gorillas, who tend to travel in groups held together by complicated sets of behaviors and social protocols, orangutans were considered to be nomadic loners, which made them all but impervious to the techniques of traditional field studies.  A prospective orangutan researcher, it was believed, could never observe multiple individuals at once, and could never hope to keep in touch with one nomadic individual over a scientifically important enough amount of time to possibly get data of any use.   Studying orangutans seemed a one-way ticket to frustration and burnout, and when Leakey was approached by a young UCLA student who knew that her goal in life was to study the great red apes, he was as impressed by her resolve as he was apprehensive about her choice.  He tried initially to shunt her towards bonobo studies.   More closely related to chimpanzees and more easily accessible, the chances for success seemed greater with bonobos, but Galdikas had set her mind upon orangutans, and as the world would come to discover, material facts had a way of withering before the intensity of her resolve. It is tempting to assign the provenance of that resolve to her family, who possessed a world-wise practicality wed to a sense of globally-scaled opportunity.  Hailing from Lithuania, they emigrated one step ahead of the Soviet Union's post World War II inhaling of their native land and, noticing that Canadian immigration quotas were not as restrictive as those in the United States, took their chance and moved to a mining town in Quebec before ultimately settling in Toronto.  Here, Galdikas, who had been born in 1946 in Germany while her family was waiting for their emigration to clear, developed a two-pronged fascination, first with the forests that invited her to ramble through their near vastness, and second for the teeming world of human history and natural wonders available at the local library.   She alternated books about ancient cultures with long roams through wild places, but when adults asked her about her ambitions, she asked what the highest academic degree was and, upon hearing it was a PhD, said that her goal was to get one of those.  She enrolled at the University of British Columbia in 1963 when she was just seventeen and found there a dusty atmosphere of lifeless academic erudition in the best 19th century tradition.  Fortunately, her family were shortly thereafter lured to tales of Californian easy prosperity, and by 1965 Galdikas was enrolled at UCLA, where informality reigned and new ideas were exploding forth seemingly from every classroom.  She sampled psychology, anthropology, and zoology on her way to a BA in psychology in 1966 and a Master's in anthropology in 1969.   All the while she had harbored a dream of studying orangutans in the wild, but her professors actively discouraged her, citing the failure of previous students to obtain meaningful information about the notoriously solitary primates.  As far as academia was concerned, orangutans were Off The Menu.  Had Galdikas entered the university a decade earlier, that might have well been that, but the examples of Leakey, Goodall, and Fossey showed that there were other ways of studying animals in the field than those offered by academic departments.  And so, when Louis Leakey himself came to lecture at UCLA, she approached him after his talk and let him know of her intention to study orangutans.  She had never done any field work in primatology.  Her areas of study were anthropology and psychology.  She was intending to study an animal that had routinely broken the will of trained researchers.   No sponsor in their right mind would have considered her offer.   Leakey, of course, said yes. A Leakey Yes, however, was not an instant ticket to Borneo, one of only two islands where orangutans could be found.  Leakey had to first nail down the funding and logistics for the expedition, a task made all the more difficult by his failing health (he would in fact die within a year of sending Galdikas to Borneo).  Galdikas had married Rod Brindamour, a rugged and rebellious motorcycle riding high school dropout, during college, and the two of them had a vision of heading straightaway to the wilds, she to study orangutans and he to photograph them.  Instead, they had to wait two long years for the proper resources to be secured, finally arriving in Borneo in 1971. Their main camp was a thatch roof hut in the middle of Tanjung Puting National Park, a game reserve irregularly protected by the Indonesian forestry department.  Dubbing the location Camp Leakey, Biruté and Rod set about what had quickly become a dual mission: to study wild orangutans, and to rehabilitate domesticated ones.  Arriving in Jakarta, they were quickly let into the open secret of Indonesia's pet orangutan fad.  Blithely unconcerned with how many orangutans were slaughtered in order to procure an orangutan infant, and heedless of the difficulties that would come when their adorable red furball grew up into a full adult, many Indonesian families took it as a sign of status to own their very own baby orangutan.  Kept in cages, their physical and psychological needs unheeded, such infants rarely survived to maturity.  Owning an orangutan was illegal, but local officials didn't seem to care to enforce the law of the land.  Biruté and Rod resolved to compel enforcement of the law, and to provide the orangutans with a safe haven, once freed.  The task of observing orangutans in Borneo is difficult enough on one's own - slogging through swamps up to your chest in leech-infested waters to just barely keep in contact with the primates who are moving effortlessly, some might say mockingly, through the trees above.  But doing it while one or two orangutan infants are holding onto you for dear life raises the difficulty level another order of magnitude.  Biruté and Rod were confronted with the entire battery of tropical snares and impediments - the punishing heat and humidity, the fire ants, the mosquitoes, malaria, the wide variety of venomous snakes that can not be kept out of a thatched roof hut, the infant orangutans who refuse to sleep anywhere but in your bed and spend the night urinating and defecating on you, the tropical sores and ulcers that break out all over your body, and any number of tropical diseases for which there are no names in the Western canon.   It was punishing, solitary work.  The orangutan infants adopted Biruté as their full fledged mother and would not tolerate removal from her person, throwing screaming destructive fits whenever somebody attempted to relieve her of her charges for long enough to allow her to change clothes, or clean herself, or use the restroom (such as it was).  Disease, fatigue, malnourishment, all combined to make these early years exercises in pure dedication.  But within and between all the suffering there was the research, the steady and addictive excitement of learning the orangutans' world.  She discovered that while, yes, adult males tend to migrate and keep to themselves, adolescents are downright gregarious, while mothers and daughters spend years traveling together, and maintain some degree of contact throughout a lifetime. Yes, orangutans aren't constantly grooming each other and jockeying for position in micro-acts of social alliance like chimps, but that doesn't mean they don't have a social sense.  Rather, as they don't form large packs that move through the forest together, they have very sensibly jettisoned all of the behaviors required for such an ultra-social arrangement, opting instead for a simpler, calmer approach to relationships that doesn't require constant adjustment and readjustment through mutual rituals.  She called orangutans "semi-social": able to form deep relationships with other orangutans, but also able to spend long stretches of time utterly alone. Prior to Galdikas's research, orangutans had been maligned as food-obsessed and intellectually on the slow side.  Because they spent most of their time moving through the forest searching for food instead of exhibiting all the interesting behaviors documented by a Goodall or a Fossey, their intellectual capacity tended to be denigrated.  All stomach, no brain.  What Galdikas found, however, was a deep botanical and spatial genius entirely appropriate to the challenges of living in the Bornean tropical jungle.  She documented over 400 types of fruit, plant, bark, and leaf that the orangutans recognized as part of their botanical repertoire, and that they had a mental map of where each type of food was to be found, and tests for determining when it all was safe to eat.  Seeing that one type of fruit was at the perfect stage of ripeness, an orangutan would make a beeline for other trees of that type in the forest, calling on deep spatial memories to guide them with unerring precision.   As she found that studying females was not only possible (females being largely non-migratory), but deeply rewarding in terms of the social data she obtained, Galdikas's plans to remain in the forest stretched from months to years and when the government declared that Tanjung Puting would be protected from foresting so long as she remained within it, the choice was clear: she would remain indefinitely. Her husband, meanwhile, was quietly brimming over with resentment.  Initially an avid and physically courageous protector of the forest, once its status was secured by government decree, he felt less and less necessary to the functioning of the camp.  As a photographer, his pictures of orangutans brought in virtually no income.  Biruté's observations of orangutans allowed her to earn a PhD, while every passing year saw Rod one year older but with less formal education than the young Camp volunteers he was training.  Worn down by seven and a half years of disease and fatigue, perpetually embarrassed by his lack of an actual paying job, and resenting the work he put in to help Biruté gain her PhD while he still hadn't had a chance to get his own degree, he began an affair with their son's Indonesian caregiver, and asked ultimately for a divorce that would allow him to return to the United States and work with the computers he was fascinated by.   It was one of those separations that was the best possible thing for all involved.  Within two years, Biruté married a native Dayak farmer named Pak Bohap and their two children grew up in a world full of the traditional Indonesian village life of their father, the orangutan research of their mother, and the North American hustle and bustle of their mother's family.  Rod got his long delayed education and his work with the machines he adored, and Biruté got to stay with her orangutans, documenting their comings and goings over the course of three full decades while Camp Leakey, which began as a worn out hut crammed with Biruté, her husband, and two native helpers, grew into a research center that served as the world's premiere point of contact with the world of the orangutans.   A world leader in the cause of orangutan conservation and rehabilitation, as a scientist her work lifted the veil on a species all but given up by the professional academic world.  The gregariousness of adolescents, the nature of the weaning process, the eight year long cycle between births, the differing nature of the mother-daughter as compared to the mother-son dynamic, the ability of males to recognize the long calls of other males in the forest and to either run away from or challenge the intruder based on hierarchy, the occasional use of makeshift tools, and the massive spatial, botanical, and social memory of orangutans - these were all things discovered by this one woman who refused to let leech or malaria, pregnancy or bog, downpour or viper, get between her and the work she had set for herself.  She was not the first to bring habituation to the primate kingdom, like Goodall, nor did she come to a tragic but memorable end, like Fossey, but in terms of guts and grit, the determination to make the body do the bidding of the mind, there are none to equal Biruté M.F. Galdikas.  Biruté Galdikas passed away on March 24, 2026, at the age of 79. FURTHER READING:  In 1996, Galdikas published her memoirs, Reflections of Eden , detailing the first two decades of her orangutan research, and in its pages are keen portraits of some of the stars of mid century primatology and anthropology, including Louis and Mary Leakey, Jane Goodall, and some astonishing anecdotes of conversations with Dian Fossey.  Most importantly, her portrayal of the semi-sociality of orangutans makes our common ancestry radiantly clear.  Their stoic isolation makes sense through her words, and the peril they face as their habitats face destruction becomes viscerally real.

1200 miles in 90 days. On horseback. Through unmapped territory. Through blizzards.  In her fifties.  Through Canadian wilderness. In the 1930s. With 12 carrier pigeons in case of emergency. To collect rare plants. This was how Mary Gibson Henry (1884 - 1967) rolled Henry’s road to becoming one of the great botanical adventurers of her, or any, age, was a long delayed one, but when it came, it came with a vengeance. She was born in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, in 1884, to a mother whose Quaker roots stretched back to the days of William Penn, and which included George Pepper, one of the early lights of the Pennsylvania Horticulture Society, and a father who was a devoted nature lover. According to her memoirs, she picked up the botany bug while on a family camping trip at the age of seven, when an encounter with a Linnaea borealis , and the woods surrounding and framing it, entranced her.  Her father passed away a year after that trip, but the family pastime of camping remained. She attended Agnes Irwin School up to the age of eighteen, whereupon her aunt took her on a tour of the American West, touring the Rocky Mountains and Grand Canyon, and drumming into young Mary’s head the dizzying array of natural phenomena available on the North American continent. Her next trip, with her mother and brother, added the natural wonders of Europe to her set of life experiences, including a trek up Mont Blanc. Though by the early 20th century, college education at multiple institutions was available for women, particularly in the northeast regions of the country, and particularly for women growing up in Quaker communities which valued women’s education, for whatever reason Mary never took this path for herself, and in 1909 she married John Norman Henry, an outdoor enthusiast and physician who would prove to be her greatest support in her later life adventuring and explorations. For the immediate future, however, her responsibilities would tend towards the familial, as she had five children who more than filled her time, though she did manage to steal some moments to grow irises, narcissi, orchids, and lilacs in a backyard greenhouse, even writing an article on orchid growing for Garden Magazine in 1924.  In 1926 or 1927 the family moved to a ninety-five acre farm in Gladwyne, Pennsylvania, where her love of plants could act on a grander scale, as she raised hundreds of different varieties of trees and shrubs, and carried out extensive projects in hybridization to produce new colors and shape profiles in her favorite plants.   At the age of forty-four, her husband, seeing her desire to acquire new plants not available through the regular catalogues or shops, told her, “Go to it and go to all the places and do all the things you want to do and I believe are well fitted to do. You have earned it all.” Taking him at his word, she outfitted what is doubtless one of history’s dopest science vehicles, a car made specifically for plant collecting that featured a bookcase, a desk with electric lighting, insulated and ventilated compartments for storing plants, three plant presses, space for tools and notebooks, all kept in running order by a regular driver who would spend the next several decades taking her wherever she wanted to explore.  Her first explorations occurred in 1929, and over the course of the next forty years she would rack up some two hundred  separate specimen finding missions, including several of continent-spanning scale. The first of these mega journeys was set in motion by a tale from a trapper she met while camping in Jasper, British Columbia. He told a story of a “Blind Spot” - an unmapped patch of Canada, notoriously difficult to approach, which boasted waterfalls, hot springs, a “tropical valley”, windswept peaks, and large expanses of boggy marshland.  The idea was too enticing to resist - a tropical zone set in the midst of the frigid Canadian wilderness? What rare varieties of plant life might such a place hold? John and Mary took nine months in planning the trip out, poring over reports of past failed expeditions to the region, organizing a nine man, 58 horse party along with all of the resources needed to support them, and arranging with the topographer K.F. McCusker to join them to produce maps of the region as they went. They left home on June 25, 1930, arriving at Fort St. John, where they met their expedition team, mounted up, and headed out west.  The party made on average seventeen miles a day, with Mary frequently dismounting to collect new plants that caught her fancy and place them in the empty cans she had placed in her saddlebags that morning. Of course, these were not ideal conditions for the long term preservation of specimens, and a solid two thirds of the plants collected did not survive the transit, but those that made it proved an invaluable source for researchers the world over. The team followed paths made by local tribes, and when those were lacking, followed those made by bears, wolves, and elk, as they wended their way up past the treeline. On August 5 they came across a 9000 foot peak that McCusker dubbed Mount Mary Henry, a name subsequently approved by the Canadian government, and by which it is still known today. Soon thereafter, the team arrived at a Sikanni camp, where the chief’s son agreed to take them to the fabled tropical valley which their trapper contact had told them of a year before. Find the valley they did, though the impact of it was blunted somewhat by a recent fire that had swept through the region. Mission accomplished, and samples taken, they turned back towards home, arriving at their start point after eighty days and a thousand miles of travel through uncharted, blizzard-prone wilderness. Mary had netted fifty cans of new plants, and seventy-six packages of seeds, and was soon at work creating herbarium sheets for collections in Scotland and Philadelphia.  Though the culminating moment proved something of a let down, on the whole Mary found the trip exhilarating, and would make a regular habit of these excursions over the decades to come, including the epic 1200 mile trek through the Northland mentioned above, terminating at Wrangell, Alaska, on October 2, 1935. Future collecting trips included expeditions to Bolivia, Honduras, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Texas, Mississippi, Arkansas, Louisiana, and her favorite azalea hunting grounds, the swamps of Georgia.   She wrote popular accounts of her excursions for National Horticulture Magazine , as well as more technical articles about the soil mixtures and greenhouse methods best adapted for raising more tropical type plants in the harsher climate of Pennsylvania. Over her career, she discovered some fifty new species, and created a rare plant garden that served as a feeder farm for some of the region’s botanical catalogues and nurseries, as well as providing individual specimens for collectors the world over who had heard of Mrs. Henry’s miraculous expeditions and the rare plants she had hauled from deep wilderness. She remained collecting into her eighties, logging 42 field days and 75 plants in her eighty-first year.  Mary Gibson Henry passed away at the age of 82 while on a collecting expedition in North Carolina, which is likely exactly how she would have wished to go. We continue to remember her today less for the hundred articles she wrote, though those are a priceless capsule of early 20th century botanical knowledge, or the hundreds of specimens she sent to botanists and horticultural societies the world over, though those proved especially valuable records in the light of the increasing habitat destruction in North America that stalked the Twentieth Century, but rather for her example of absolute love of her craft and devotion to nature which radiates from her memoirs and life. This was a person who saw a miracle in each flower she met, and in communicating that sense of the miraculous to the world, she brought more people into the mid-century wilderness conservation movement, allowing us to hold on to those few protected spaces we still had, where we can walk, and wander, and experience a small bit of the wonder that Mary Gibson felt as a seven year old beholding Linnaea borealis and feeling, somewhere deep within her, that these small creatures were to be the work of her life. FURTHER READING: I first came across Henry’s story in Penny Colman’s Adventurous Women (2006), which is a fun little volume that includes a couple of figures we’ve talked about before, including Louise Boyd and Alice Hamilton, and then again in Stefan White’s gorgeous Heroines of Horticulture (2024). Both of them have a handful of pages devoted to her, but luckily their focuses are slightly different so between them you get a nice interleafing picture of her life and work.

On November 11, 1938, Mary Mallon, the woman known to the papers and to all of history ever after as Typhoid Mary, passed away on North Brother Island, where she had been lodged by the New York City Department of Health for the previous 23 years to safeguard the general population from the disease which she carried. Her life’s course since 1907 had been entirely determined by the persistence in her body of an illness that, to her dying day, she insisted she never had, but which she regularly passed to the individuals whose food she prepared in her profession as a cook.  She was the first individual identified by modern bacteriological science as a “living carrier” of the typhoid bacillus - an individual entirely healthy to all appearances, but able to transmit the disease she carried to others under the right conditions. Her existence called forth new questions for those engaged in the emerging field of public health - how many more like Mary are there? How do we find them before they cause harm?  And once found, how do we ethically and responsibly protect civilization from potential epidemics while also safeguarding the freedom of individuals?  The story of Mary Mallon (1869-1938) is the story of public health finding its first answers to these questions, making up the rules as it went along in this new and often frightening world, as much as it is the story of an immigrant trying to make sense of everything happening to her while attempting to craft for herself something like a life worth living. She was born in 1869 in Ireland and came to the United States in 1883, just in time for the great foodie craze of the late 19th century, as wealthy households competed with each other to put the finest European cuisine before their guests. Mary, by all accounts, was a gifted cook in an age that valued them, and this skill allowed her to escape the routine grind that was most Irish immigrants’ lot.  By the early 20th century, she was regularly cooking for upper class families, who routinely spoke of their satisfaction with her work. Sometime on or about 1900 she contracted typhoid fever, a disease that regularly killed some ten percent of those who came down with it, but which struck the robust Mary as little more than a flu, easily overcome. Like a tenth of those who had typhoid fever, the bacillus remained in her system, an outcome that she could have gone her entire life without being aware of it were it not for her profession. As a cook, and particularly as a cook of items like puddings and ice creams that were not placed in an oven and raised to a bacteria-killing temperature, she was uniquely suited to pass germs from unclean hands onto the food she served, and for a seven year period from 1900 to 1907 typhoid followed her wherever she went. Of the eight families she was documented to have worked for in this era, seven of them displayed cases of typhoid soon after she joined the household, but each time the incidents were either not investigated, or were written off as due to water contamination or blamed on the first person to show symptoms. The idea of living carriers had been existent in the medical literature, and particularly that of Germany, for a decade by that point, but nobody connected the dots on Mary’s role until a homeowner by the name of George Thompson, eager to clear the reputation of a rental property where six members of a family had caught typhoid, hired an epidemic expert by the name of George Soper (1870-1948). Soper was meticulous in his investigation, eliminating water and food contamination as the sources of the disease, and moving on to a detailed documentation of the individuals who had come into contact with the family. When he was told that Mary had been a new addition to the family just before the outbreak, he dug into the records of Mary’s hiring agency, and found a trail of typhoid occurrences stretching back seven years, encompassing some twenty-two cases and at least one death, all happening soon after Mary’s arrival with the families in question. Placing this chain of incidents together with his own knowledge of the German theory of living carriers, he hypothesized that Mary was, through her handling of food, spreading typhoid wherever she worked, but needed to run blood, feces, and urine tests to be sure. His approach was not great. He first contacted Mary at her work, informed her of his theory, and asked her to give up samples of her precious bodily fluids. Faced with a strange man claiming that she was spreading a disease she believed she never had, and asking her earnestly for samples of her excrement, she logically enough became angry and brandished a carving fork at him to clear him from the premises. He tried again, at her home, carting along a doctor friend whom he apparently thought would help to lend validity to his ideas and diffuse the situation, but that attempt failed equally spectacularly and there was nothing for it but to bring in the long arm of the New York City Health Department, which by city statute had virtual carte blanche to act how it saw fit in cases of potential danger to the public health.  They sent out Josephine Baker (whom we met earlier in this series as the reigning brain behind the country’s child health care movement of the early 20th century), then just at the beginning of her career, thinking that a woman bringing the request might produce a better result.  It did not, and Baker had to return the next day with five policemen. Mary slammed the door on them and, when the police entered the room, they found it completely empty. Seeing the window open and a chair perched near the fence beyond, they reasoned that she had gone on the lam, and only found her at last hiding in a garden shed because of a patch of calico fabric from her dress that was peeking from the doorway.  It took the full might of all the assembled policemen to subdue her, while Baker later wrote that on the drive to Willard Parker Hospital that ensued she had to physically sit on Mallon to keep her from leaping up and trying to break free. Once at the hospital, bacteriological tests revealed substantial presence of typhoid bacilli in her system, proving Soper’s theory and providing the world with its first example of a living typhoid carrier, prompting the significant question of What Now?  Ideally, Mallon would have been cured of her carrier status so that she could rejoin the world in her chosen occupation, but at the time nobody knew how that could be done. Various medications were tried, but none seemed to have a reliable impact on the bacillus count in her fecal samples. It was believed that the gallbladder was the preferred residence and breeding ground for typhoid bacilli, and that its removal might cure her, but Mallon rejected that option, and when gallbladder removal in later cases involving living carriers didn't seem to impact bacillus count, it reenforced this decision. There seemed to be nothing to do but hold her in isolation for an unspecified amount of time, a strategy that nobody liked, but that nobody could offer a better alternative to. Meanwhile, word got out that a poor Irish cook was being held against her will in a purgatory like state of isolation, never having had the benefit of a trial or appeal, and well-wishers soon provided funds to secure her legal counsel (a popular theory is that William Randolph Hearst fronted the money as part of his drive to secure sensational copy for his paper in its constant battle with Pulitzer’s World ).  Mallon turned out to be something of a deft hand in the public relations department, tugging on heartstrings with the injustice of her situation, detained indefinitely for something she had no control over, prodded by doctors whose story about how best to treat her kept changing, all in the name of a disease that she adamantly denied ever having. Unfortunately for her, the hospital’s stool samples told a compelling story that, though the typhoid bacillus was intermittent in her labwork, the results were nonetheless positive over two-thirds of the time, and the judge, unwilling to have any future outbreaks of the disease caused by her release be upon his head, denied her request to be set at liberty.  Though denied by the courts, Mallon’s story proved affecting enough that the next health commissioner, Ernst Lederle, took pity on her position in 1910 and released her after she promised to never work in food preparation again. She was set up with a position as a laundress and given her freedom. She was not long in breaking her promise, for a host of potential reasons that historians love to speculate about - perhaps the step down in status from honored cook to anonymous washwoman was too much for her pride to take, perhaps the reduction in salary was too much to bear, perhaps she simply missed doing the one thing that she persistently excelled at - whatever the reason, she was soon back in the kitchen again. Not for upper class families, of course - they tended to hire from reputable agencies, and those agencies knew Mallon too well to take her on as a client - but for families and organizations that needed an extra kitchen hand and didn’t look too closely at who was offering it. For five years, Mallon kept successfully under the radar until she made the decision to take up employment at Sloane Maternity Hospital under the not at all clearly fake name of Mary Brown. This was evidently a terrible, bordering on criminal, decision, as it meant exposing pregnant women and newborns to typhoid fever, and in early 1915 an outbreak at the hospital resulted in 25 cases and 2 deaths. Mary, to her credit, did not run this time when her role was found out. She did not threaten the authorities, scale fences, secret herself away in a shed, or require the physical restraint of several strapping young men to drag her into custody, but was simply taken in her restroom without a fight.  The public was not so kind to Mallon’s plight this time around. The double punch of having gone back on her word and having done so in a manner that put mothers and babies at risk burned much of the good will she had earned through her first isolation period, and few were the voices seriously calling for her to be put back at liberty. And so she would spend the next twenty-three years of her life on North Brother Island. This did give her food, shelter, and medical services during the lean years of the Depression when other women her age and profession were scrambling for the barest of livings, and she even found some employment doing lab work for the hospital on the island, and was eventually allowed to go into the city on day trips from time to time. However, against this relative security there was the basic fact that she was not a free human, that the outside world knew her name as a term of revilement, and that her week to week existence involved having her physical privacy regularly invaded as new samples were taken and new procedures suggested.  Meanwhile, in the public health sphere, the extent of the living carrier phenomenon was making officials aware that the solution employed in Mary’s case could not be the standard approach going forward. More and more living carriers were being identified with each year, and the scale of keeping so many individuals in state-sponsored humane private confinement went far beyond the resources of most health departments to maintain. The problem became more pronounced as improved central filtration and sanitation eliminated the previously dominant sources of typhoid fever, meaning that new outbreaks increasingly came exclusively from living carriers who perpetuated the bacilli in their own persons.  Public health officials were spared, however, having to figure out where to put potential tens of thousands of Mary Mallons thanks to the increasing use of anti-typhoid vaccines that came into prevalence in the 1910s and 1920s. Though they dodged the bullet on typhoid, the example of Mary has loomed large with every new public health crisis the United States has faced. The heavy handed treatment she faced leading up to and throughout her first period of isolation have served us a textbook example of how Not to go about isolating individuals for the public good, while the example of the second breakout caused by her release has also taught us not to err too far on the side of loose enforcement of public health measures.  Typhoid Mary represented a stumbling attempt by the modern health infrastructure to put a cap on a public health problem emanating from a lone individual, and Mary Mallon bore the brunt of that stumbling - the lack of privacy, communication, process, and transparency all made her deeply suspicious of the medical establishment and embittered towards the society that rushed to constrict the boundaries of her personal freedom to suit its own comfort. If we have gotten better about conveying medical information, and making patients suffering from epidemic diseases co-actors in the process of their own recovery and that of their neighborhoods, it is because of what we learned from the case of Mary Mallon, and it does us well to remember that when we find ourselves growing indignant about the woman who went back on her word and risked infecting others. Typhoid Mary was created by our treatment of her, and she will continue to recur whenever we choose force, obfuscation, and intimidation over open communication, education, and collaboration in our struggles with the dark forces that threaten us from within our persons.  FURTHER READING: The classic book on Typhoid Mary is Judith Leavitt’s Typhoid Mary: Captive to the Public’s Health (1996 - and the fact that this year occurred three decades ago is existentially terrifying to me), which is a captivating look at not only Mary’s story, but at the evolution of the public health system at the turn of the Twentieth Century, and the part that societal roles, the rise of bacteriology, and institutional structures played in the tale of Typhoid Mary. Easier to find is Anthony Bourdain’s odd little Typhoid Mary  volume (2001) which tells the story from the point of view of what Mary might have thought and felt as a chef. It’s wafer thin, and half of it is Bourdain talking about how chefs’ base state is that of simmering rage, but it’s also fun and breezy and a good introduction if you don’t have Leavitt at hand. This was the 289th installment of the Women in Science series.

In the opening days of the Nazi attack on France, a Jewish engineer took his family aside and instructed them on how to commit suicide by slitting their wrists, explaining that death by one’s own hand was more honorable than what would happen to them if they fell to the enemy. As the family fled from town to town, desperate to escape Europe and the Nazi juggernaut, the engineer’s daughter, Fay Ajzenberg (1926-2012), just fourteen years old, lived every day with the prospect of having to take her own life come nightfall. Sadly, the ominous specter of suicide was a familiar one already to the girl. Her mother was an emotionally volatile woman who would describe to the young Fay in detail how she was planning to kill herself, probably in Fay’s room. The six year old who heard the minutiae of her own mother’s suicide plans became the teenager who knew nothing so surely as that she would die a teenager still, and by her own hand. But fate had a way of tossing the Ajzenbergs about between miraculous and horrid fortune. In the Russian Revolution, her father had to hold up a train at gunpoint to get his family out of the country, only to settle in Germany just in time for the rising tide of anti-Semitism to push him onward to France, where he had no sooner started to settle than the German tanks over-ran any hope of a normal life. And yet, the Ajzenbergs were not captured and, through a series of unlikely events, even managed to book passage to Santo Domingo, where engineers were desperately needed, via New York. Photo by Emilio Segre Arriving in New York, the family quite sensibly decided that it might be best to stay there and just give the whole Santo Domingo leg of the trip a miss. They had connections amongst the established Jewish community in America, and Fay’s father started up a motor company that would steadily grow into a moderate giant over the next two decades. Meanwhile, there was Fay. Caught between the brilliant and exciting world of her father, and the emotionally damaging outbursts of her mother, Fay naturally modeled herself on the former, and decided on a career in science. This began a series of truly titanic failures that would have leveled any lesser of a person. It seemed that, every science class Fay put her hand to, she bombed miserably. Her memoirs are a catalogue of courses taken and failed, C averages across all classes being just barely scratched out, professors encouraging her spirit but lamenting her results. In high school, in college, even at the graduate school she somehow managed to attend in spite of her scholastic record, she crashed with phenomenal regularity. Chemistry, draftsmanship, quantum physics, electrical engineering … all grand exercises in abject failure. Most of us would have taken the universe’s subtle hints and moved on to less demanding fields, but Ajzenberg was determined to be a scientist and, in fact, as she had more opportunities to DO science rather than to take an endless number of tests ABOUT science, she found she had a gift for it. She was fascinated by cosmic rays, and spent a stretch of time on a frozen mountain cosmic ray station where water was so dear that the toilets featured alarms that went off whenever you closed the door in an attempt to make you think twice about whether you really needed to go. Unfortunately, however, cosmic ray facilities were few and far between, and Ajzenberg had to switch to a more accessible field, and chose the study of the light elements. After some promising early work discovering a method to synthesize pure lithium-6 from lithium-6 sulphate, she wrote to Caltech’s Tom Lauritsen and offered to revise a previous article of his, a roundup of everything that had been written up to then about the energy levels of the light elements. He agreed, and Ajzenberg headed to California to collaborate on the rewrite and to become the physicist she was meant to be. This was Caltech in the 1950s, a place where, as likely as not, Richard Feynman would pop into your office and talk for four hours about his latest physical insights, making the most complex of ideas mystifyingly simple to grasp. For somebody who still felt academically shaky, it was the best place to be, and she found herself supported on all sides by people willing to share their ideas. And, in the meantime, there was the gargantuan task of preparing the update to Lauritsen’s review of the light elements. It was a massive project, requiring Ajzenberg to read hundreds and thousands of articles announcing new measurements for different excitation states of various isotopes, and to use her knowledge of established results (and, eventually, experience of each lab’s track record and reputation) to ascertain the worth of each study. She set to work recording the known energy levels on massive sheets of paper which lined the halls at Caltech, and which she’d update as new data came in. She was the nerve center for the entire world’s efforts in quantifying and understanding the behavior of the light elements, and she would remain so for the next thirty-eight years. That first review was eighty pages long at the final cut, but soon the Lauritsen-Ajzenberg articles ballooned to hundreds of pages until, by the time of her retirement, she could say that her work on cataloguing the light elements alone ran to over five thousand pages of the most referenced and useful information available to the nuclear physics community. To read through thousands of papers took stamina. To sift them for relative worth and plausibility took insight and experience. And if she had done nothing else but tirelessly put out that inestimable review for four decades, it would be enough to earn our continued thanks, but of course she did more than that. Because she saw the collected work of the light element community, she knew where holes existed, and devoted her efforts to designing and running experiments to fill those holes. Often lacking adequate facilities at the colleges she taught at, she was able to borrow time on the cyclotrons and electrostatic generators of larger institutions, her massive web of acquaintance happily allowing her to use whatever she needed. In fact, for the first half of her life, her career was remarkably absent of any smear of sexism. Wherever she went, she was instantly accepted as another One of the Guys, her talent recognized and rewarded in spite of her abysmal academic record. She acquired funding easily through the government, and generally found work that had just the balance of teaching, research, and committee time that she found most rewarding. Where Goeppert-Mayer slogged and toiled to maintain unpaid and unofficial positions, Ajzenberg won Guggenheim scholarships to study wherever she wanted, and whatever she thought was interesting. It wasn’t until 1972 that discrimination powerfully raised its head. After counseling a distraught and brilliant grad student who was told by her physics advisor to settle down and have babies before thinking about a career in physics, Ajzenberg resolved to take a more public role in arguing for the position of women in physics. She applied for a tenured position at the University of Pennsylvania, and when she was turned down for not being “active enough” in nuclear physics, she prepared a master list of article citations which showed that her work was referenced more than anybody in her department save for one Nobel Prize winner. She brought her case to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and sued the school for discrimination, and won. The time invested in fighting the case was substantial, the risk to her career was likewise immense, but in the end she won, and once in the door, she found herself as easily accepted as she had been everywhere else, except now she had some ability to affect larger change in how the university, and the physics community generally, approached the young female physicists clamoring for a voice. Teaching, research, pushing for the greater inclusion of women in science, and hopping about the world to bring the global physics community together in the face of the Cold War, these were all daunting enough tasks for the healthiest of people, but Ajzenberg was, from her mid-forties onward, always in danger of complete physical collapse. Diagnosed with breast cancer, she underwent an operation that removed one breast, only to lose the other years later after a grueling chemotherapy regimen which gave her cancer of the bladder several years later still. Repeatedly operated on, pumped full of chemicals, and undertaking the jobs of four or five normal people simultaneously, she yet lived a magnificently full life, resigning her research in 1989 and her seminal summaries of the light nuclei in 1990, then going on to live another twenty-two years as an advocate for women’s science, winning the National Medal of Science in 2008, and privately all the while enjoying the songs of Vysotsky, spoken in the language she learned as a child, a half a world, and a full lifetime away. FURTHER READING: For the first half, Ajzenberg-Selove’s memoir, A Matter of Choices (1994), is one of the most interesting and unique science autobiographies to be had. It is brutally frank in admitting the profound depth of her academic failure, and refreshingly direct in its portrayal of her conversion to atheism, and her assessment of the political foibles of her time. The second half drifts a bit, but then the second half of most scientists’ memoirs are rather drifty, becoming a catalogue of committee responsibilities and international science congresses that are crucial for the advancement of science, but make for sloooooooow reading. This piece was originally published as the 41st column of the Women in Science series, in 2015.

To be a poor immigrant in mid-nineteenth century New York was to be a creature almost entirely at the mercy of mammoth social forces and fickle chance. Immigration from Ireland in the wake of the Potato Famine and from Germany following the unrest of 1848 had packed the city with more men and women than there were jobs or apartments to sustain them, a positive boon for industrialists who found that they could reduce wages to near starvation levels and still have plenty of willing workers with whom to staff their factories, but which created a thick soup of misery for everybody else.  This was a hard enough world for a man to live in, but for a woman it was an exercise in almost constant anxiety. Given that birth control methods were at best inaccessible due to the wall of silence that the medical establishment and society had erected to keep women from knowing about their bodies, and at worst were out and out scams peddled by charlatans, each sexual encounter carried with it the distinct possibility of pregnancy, a pregnancy that was in and of itself potentially deadly for both child and mother in the age before antiseptics were routine in the delivery room, and even if the delivery were survived by both, what followed for the new mother was a litany of seemingly unanswerable Hows. How will we find the money to feed and clothe this child? How will I find somebody to care for it when I go back to work, because I have to go back to work? How will I afford that somebody?  Looking around at other women in her position, the new mother would see that there were nothing but bad answers to be had - some dropped their children off at children’s centers where the odds were high that they would not live out the month, and others simply used drugs to keep their children in a regular stupor for the ten to fourteen hours they would be at work. While the upper and middle classes could moralize about the virtues of motherhood, safely insulated from its consequences through layers upon layers of money, for the dwellers of the city’s packed tenements, a new pregnancy was a dangerous and frightening thing, and they availed themselves of any number of methods to avoid that barrage of Hows that they had no ready answers to. While all medicine during this era was largely unregulated, with doctors earning degrees simply on the strength of having paid an institution to give them one, abortion services represented a fundamentally clandestine space which, decade by decade, had to adjust its strategies as waves of pragmatism and moralism swept over the nation. In this arena of apothecaries peddling abortion pills of various lethality, and doctors performing abortions in back rooms and cellars, a practitioner of both conscience and competence represented something of a beacon of hope to the serially pregnant and destitute, and one name for four decades topped the list of those who could be depended on to do a professional job with maximum discretion, whose very name became, and remains, synonymous with the figure of “the lady abortionist” - the woman known as Madame Restell (1812-1878).  Madame Restell lies at the intersection of a rich host of mythologies - legends she made up about herself, slanders concocted by her enemies, and guesses constructed by her contemporaries in the absence of solid facts about where she came from and where she learned her craft. She portrayed herself as a physician trained in the best French traditions, but that was all of a piece with the loose world of 19th century medical marketing, where fanciful origin stories and broad claims were so pervasive as to be expected. In fact, Restell was born Ann Trow, in Gloucestershire, in 1812. Her father worked at the local wool mill, and her education was likely a minimal one. She was sent off at 15 to be a domestic servant for a butcher and his family, and the regular grinding labor required likely made her in later years the generally generous and understanding employer that she was.  For a girl of poor family, with limited education, the only real way out of household drudgery was marriage, and at the age of 16 Ann Trow took this step, marrying Henry Sommers, a tailor. This would have been a good match - tailors had a skilled trade that was in relatively constant demand - but unfortunately this particular tailor was an alcoholic who let more and more of the business slide onto his wife’s shoulders. They had a child in 1830, and the next year the small family boarded a boat for New York, where, so rumor had it, the demand for skilled labor was so intense that you would have to actively work diligently not to get rich. One harrowing boat ride later, the Sommers family found, like so many before them, that the rumors of easy prosperity could not have been more mistaken. Life for an immigrant in the New York of the 1830s and 40s was a chancy thing - there were always more workers than available jobs, and more bodies than beds, and establishing something like a bare minimum of existence was granted only to the lucky or clever few.  Fortunately, Ann was both of these, gifted with a deft and skilled mind, and perhaps more importantly, with a shrewd business sense that intuitively knew a promising profession, and how to employ advertising to elbow aside her competition. Her family took up residence on Chatham Street, a booze-soaked, prostitution-rife neighborhood where she struggled, like so many others, to turn a profit on the strength of her sewing needle, but was fortunate enough to be offered a way out of that uncertain life by her association with her nearby neighbor, Dr. William Evans.  Evans was a pill compounder, which meant a wide variety of potential things in 19th century America. Some, perhaps most, pill compounders were simple flim flam men, selling sugar pills as Miracle Medicine, but others were conscientious medical practitioners doing their best with the information they had, and Evans was likely one of these. Ann learned from him, and turned towards manufacturing one of the most popular pill types on the market, those aimed at getting rid of unwanted pregnancies. Her products contained ingredients effective enough to produce a rich crop of repeat customers, but not so extreme that they did permanent damage to their users. In fact, for all of her years of operation as a manufacturer of pills and abortionist, we do not have a single confirmed case of a fatality caused by her operations, a phenomenal enough result in modern medicine, but an almost unworldly level of success for that place and time. These were years of rapid self-invention. Ann’s first husband died in 1833, and in 1835 she married the free-thinking Charles Lohman, who would be a steady supporter in the decades to come, but was likely not the mastermind of her business empire as contemporary writers, unable to fathom the idea of a woman running a successful business, often claimed. The pair did, however, likely collaborate on coming up with Ann’s marketing persona, Madame Restell. Unlike Ann, the British household servant turned seamstress, Restell was a sophisticated medical practitioner, trained in Vienna and Paris, inheritor of a familial tradition of medication production, itself surrounded and supported by the French reputation for excellence in the ways of forward thinking family control.  Now as Madame Restell, Ann leapt into the exciting world of medical advertising. This was a battleground of words and ideas that Restell had an instinctive mastery of. There were other individuals advertising abortion pills in the pages of the age’s newspapers, but they overwhelmingly attempted to hide what their products were behind the fig leaf of allusions and euphemisms. Restell would have none of this. Let others advertise their pills as treatments for “female irregularity”, whatever that meant, she would tell her customers exactly what her pills were for and what they did. While others tried to hide their occupation, Restell proudly proclaimed hers, shoving essays into her advertisements about the societal benefits of allowing women to have some manner of control over their reproductive destinies.  Were large stretches of these essays cribbed unrepentantly from the pages of Robert Dale Owen (1801-1877) and his 1831 work Moral Physiology ? Sure. Was that common practice of the era? Absolutely. Most importantly, to newspaper readers of the era, these essays and ads assured them that in Madame Restell they had a medical professional who understood their troubles, and was not ashamed of offering her experience to help them in their hour of need. Restell’s products soon topped the market, shoving aside longer established but more circumspect practitioners of the craft. Over the 1830s, Restell’s door was the destination of choice for young men and women in a desperate situation (or those in an affluent situation eager to avoid scandal), whom Restell would start on her pills and, should they provide insufficient, or if the pregnancy was too far along, she would then offer her medical skills as an abortionist. Business was good, and Restell was soon easily recognizable on the streets of New York for the splendidness of her carriage and the richness of her fashion. She was an indispensable personage, one who, far from taking the abuse of the city’s morality purveyors in abashed silence, struck back in literary salvos of her own, supported by a cast of colorful journalists and newspaper owners who reveled in the profitable chaos she created. Of course, this only encouraged some newspaper owners to select Restell as a target precisely because they knew she would respond, making them more famous as a result, but by and large those figures came and went without creating permanent waves in the serene progress of Restell’s ascent to the ranks of the city’s wealthiest individuals.  The triumphant procession of the 1830s, however, soon ran aground on the crackdown on abortion practitioners that swept New York in the 1840s. Newspapers eager to end what they saw as the civilization-ending trend of women controlling their reproduction latched onto some high profile cases involving botched abortions, and used them to whip up momentum for larger scale bans on abortion throughout the state. Restell weathered a series of lawsuits against her in the early years of the decade, when providing abortion was legally a misdemeanor offense, but when a new law was passed in 1845 that categorized abortion past the stage of “quickening” as manslaughter, Restell was in real danger of going to prison.  Just because a law was passed, however, didn’t mean that women suddenly stopped needing Restell’s services, and she, believing in the importance of her work and enjoying the lifestyle brought in by the fees she could charge thanks to her reputation and record of success, continued to operate more or less as she had before. She was duly brought to trial in 1847, convicted, and sent to prison, though her status as a member of the city’s wealthy elite meant that her experience was generally a comfortable one, with a private room, nice sheets, and plenty of visitors, good food, and reading material.  Returning home from prison, Restell picked up more or less where she left off, and would not seriously curtail her activities as a producer of pills and performer of abortions until her “death” in 1878. In the intervening years, her wealth grew to profound levels, allowing her to comfortably pay far too much to buy a plot of land just to spite the priest of a nearby Catholic church who had made it his business to rail against her from the pulpit and who dearly wanted the land for himself, and then to build a sumptuous mansion upon it which she wanted to be a new social hub for the city, but which largely just attracted members of the newly rich who did not yet have social reputations to care about losing.  Meanwhile, she was a complicated figure for the nascent women’s medical movement to grapple with. Theoretically, as a well-paid medical practitioner with a sterling record for patient safety and satisfaction, she could have been an exemplar to hold up for how women could succeed in the medical profession. In actuality, she was an eternal thorn in the side of women like Elizabeth Blackwell or Sophia Jex-Blake who were seeking to broaden women’s access to medical education in the mid 19th century. Papers proclaimed that women who had a medical education would just go on to be new Madame Restells, allured by the easy cash to be had, and deadened to the moral consequences of their actions. The example of Restell gave the medical community the ammunition they needed to publicly and persistently block and bemoan any attempts at expanded women’s access to medical universities or hospitals, and as a result it was a rare female physician indeed who was willing to publicly come to the defense of Restell and what she did. How much the distancing of her fellow women medical professionals from herself mattered to Restell during these years of plenty it is difficult to say, but she would soon have larger problems to worry about in the form of America’s self-appointed morality czar, Anthony Comstock (1844-1915). This was a man who expanded his shame at his own urge to masturbate into a national campaign against sexual immorality that consumed the lives and careers of countless individuals. The law passed in his name in 1873 gave him oversight of the US mail system, allowing for the arrest of anybody who not only sent birth control methods through the mail, but anything even mentioning the subject of birth control, or female biology, at all. His goal was to keep women in perpetual ignorance of their bodies and options as a way of preventing them from sinning against the natural order as he conceived it, and Restell was a natural target of his wrath. Using the technique of entrapment, he was able to create grounds for her arrest. The moral fervor whipped up by Comstock ensured that Restell had a difficult time finding people who would publicly come to her aid and post bail, and the prospect of prison loomed large for the now sixty-five year old woman. According to one story, the stress of the proceedings, and the certainty that she would be returning to jail, caused her to take her own life on April 1, 1878, slitting her throat in her bathtub, to be found by a servant, and hastily buried by her family. And that might have been what happened, but another version of the story goes like this: realizing that she was going to be convicted, and that America under Comstock was no longer a place she could live and work, she tapped into her deep financial resources to bribe a few officials, procured a stand-in body, and, with the help of her grandchildren, who were devoted to her steadfastly, faked her own death while escaping to France to live out the rest of her life, comfortable and undisturbed.  I know which version I want to believe, and there is a decent amount of evidence for the faked suicide plot (her body was later dug up and said to look nothing like her, the method of death was a brutal one for a medical woman who would have known of more pleasant means, later individuals testified to meeting her in France, and so forth). No matter what version you take as canon, she distinctly disappears from the history books in 1878 as a public individual, but lives on to this day as an example, for some of the wickedness of abortion and those who practice it, and for others of the deep medical needs unique to women which have come hard against civilization’s drive to legislate the options that women in desperate situations possess, calling into existence individuals like Madame Restell, skilled in their craft, disdainful of the callousness of society, and willing to operate in the shadows to provide necessary services for a segment of the country whose hardships amounted to little or nothing in the columns of the press and the halls of the lawmakers. She did something she thought was a social good, made a lot of money doing it, and if she ended her days sipping champagne in Paris, far from the struggles that consumed her life for four decades, well, she more than earned the right to it. FURTHER READING: Jennifer Wright’s recent (2023) biography of Madame Restell is likely going to be the go-to text for a while now. It is deeply researched, with fascinating glimpses into the war of words waged between abortionists in their advertisements, and between abortionists and anti-abortionists in the era’s newspapers. It is also incredibly engaging in its writing style, with a steady thrum of jaunty irreverence which still conveys the seriousness of the book’s central themes. More technical is Nicholas Syrett’s book (also 2023) focusing on Restell’s trials and the abortion laws of the era, while the earlier biographies by Keller (1981) and Browder (1988) are still pretty easy to find used editions of if you are looking for a blend of secondary sources.  This has been the 288th entry in the Women In Science Archive series.

Before Jane and Dian, Biruté and Jeanne, there was Anne.   In 1957 Anne Innis (1933-2024) became the first woman to attempt a solo animal research expedition in Africa when she undertook the observation of giraffes in South Africa. Three years later, Jane Goodall entered the wilds of Tanzania to observe the chimpanzees there.  Goodall emerged to fame and the sort of global adoration usually reserved for socially conscious pop stars, while Innis faced decades of frustration picking valiantly at the periphery of an academic establishment that had no time for her or her proposed revolutions.  She cowered before no idols, and entertained no fear of repeatedly entering the arena against the most powerful assumptions of the university system, refusing to let failure in the previous crusade dampen her ardor for the next until finally, imperceptibly at first, but eventually at pace, the system moved. Innis's career contradicts everything one expects of a 20th century academic - the common trajectory of initial achievement giving way to overwhelming specialization and eventually tapering off in soul-flattening rounds of administrative responsibility was neither thrust upon her by circumstance nor sought by her polymath temperament, and so she has had the opportunity to spend her decades researching problems that interested her as they arose, regardless of how their field of origin connected with her supposed field of expertise.  Ranging through her list of publications one finds pieces on animal gaits, giraffe homosexuality, gender problems in academia, the ethics of animal experimentation, a model for the essential non-violence of early man, a codex of important women non-fiction authors, and several critiques of sociobiology, to name just a fraction of her prodigious output. How did such a person arise in the midst of a university system so aggressively allergic to the intellectual breadth it habitually styles as dilettantism?  Part of the answer surely comes from her parents, brilliant individuals both who modeled the virtue of hard intellectual work to their children.  Her father was a University of Toronto economics professor and World War I veteran who worked from 9 to 4 then came home and researched and wrote until it was time for bed, while her mother both ran the house and had a career as an author of fiction and textbooks.  They taught by example the habits and joys of scholarship, to the extent that Innis found (and continues to find) unproductive leisure a most miserable prospect. The other source of Innis's broad productivity is of less happy provenance.  Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, in spite of having been the first person to undertake a thorough study of wild giraffe behavior, and in spite of having been the first person to attempt a scientific description of the mechanical differences in animal gait patterns, she found herself consistently passed over for a full time university position.  As a part-time lecturer, her classes were well-attended and enjoyed by the student body.  Her work ethic ensured a steady stream of publications which any department ought to have been honored to count among its productions.  And yet, when tenure positions opened up, or promotions loomed, they inevitably went to males of lesser experience with far fewer publications (and, more importantly, citations) under their belts.   Shoved to the periphery of the Canadian university system, granted odd part-time work here and there but never a full and protected research position, she was not hedged in by the strictures of academic advancement.  She was thus in a unique position to pursue questions that interested her, and to see weaknesses in academic hiring and research practices that were unapparent to those on the inside.  She compiled statistics about the treatment of women students and professors and put her findings into articles, and her energy into committees that sought to redress the worst imbalances in Canadian classroom and hiring practices.   Later, faced with a surge in intellectual popularity for male-centric sociobiological explanations of infanticide and rape, she again put her shoulder to the research wheel, digging through archives to find the original source material for the studies cited by the sociobiologists, and exposing important omissions that cast their conclusions in a significantly different light.   As if amassing evidence of gender abuses on both the administrative and theoretical levels were not enough to fill her time, Innis concurrently began a campaign to reconsider the effectiveness and necessity of animal testing in university and private research.  As a younger researcher, she had been a first hand witness to the casual cruelty inflicted on animals in the name of science of dubious value.  After an experience placing a terrified chinchilla in a tank of water to measure its swimming motions, she resolved never to place another animal in distress merely to satisfy her own curiosity, and designed her observations to take place in natural circumstances that did not negatively impact the animals.   Privately abstaining from the use of laboratory animals early in her career, it was not until some decades later that she began compiling statistics on the effectiveness of animal research generally, creating a fascinating new metric to measure the utility of such studies.  This metric, the AN/CN rating, divided the number of animals killed in a study by the number of citations of that study in the scientific literature to determine how egregiously a study threw away animal life in the name of science that failed to answer questions which enthralled the larger scientific community.   She found that some nations were much more responsible than others in the design of their experiments, and that universities scored far less well than private companies in responsibly using animals for experimentation only in studies of large impact.  Ahead of her time when she began investigating the issue of ethical experiment design with regard to animal use, she has lived long enough to see her work the focus and inspiration of a new generation of ethically motivated researchers who stand a chance, just perhaps, of compelling a broad-based rethink of university policy. Throughout her life, publishing the results of her work has been a tricky affair for Innis.  Books and articles that directly confronted academic biases had difficulty finding publishers, while her many forays into the cataloguing of Canada's local wildlife were often rejected as of too limited interest for publication.  So, she established Otter Press to publish her own works and thereby shepherd them into the hands of students at a reasonable price in order that they in turn might take her observations of university shortcomings to heart and use them to push for a more conscientious and inclusive future.   But at the end of the day, if you know about Anne Innis Dagg, it is most likely not for her bold feminism or uncompromising calls for the ethical treatment of animals, but for her work in giraffe research.  It began with her youthful fascination with the animal, culminating in her 1957 solo trip to South Africa to observe the animals in the wild first hand (a trip that was only made possible by the fact that she signed her letters of inquiry "A. Innis" and thereby hid the fact of her gender from her prospective hosts until it was too late to reverse her invitation) and the publication of the classic text The Giraffe: Its Biology, Behavior and Ecology with J. Bristol Foster in 1976.  That book has served as the Bible of all things giraffe for two generations of zookeepers and field researchers, and its subsequent updates and companion volume Giraffe: Behavior, and Conservation (2014) have cemented her role as the world's giraffe ambassador.   Anne Innis Dagg continued to observe the animals that have formed the regular weft of her career into her 80s, while keeping a sharp eye out on a world capable of much casual cruelty, but also of self-awareness and gradual improvement so long as there are people like her willing to stake their reputation for what is right and fair, human and humane.  She passed away in 2024 at the age of 91. FURTHER READING:  Innis has written of her experiences during her year long wild giraffe study ( Pursuing Giraffe: A 1950s Adventure (2006)) and about her career in general, with a focus on her broad and revolutionary research projects in Smitten by Giraffe: My Life as a Citizen Scientist (2016).  If you're in it for giraffes, go for the former, if you came for some deep looks at academic sexism and institutionalized animal cruelty, then head for the latter!

On August 29, 1971, a 59 year old Greek woman who was beloved throughout Athens for the lengths she had gone to during World War II to aid the Resistance against the Nazis and protect Jews, foreign officers, and conscientious objectors from prison and execution, was arrested by her own country’s government and accused of treason against the state. It was not her first time being arrested - the Nazis had kept her in prison for six months in 1944 with the constant threat of execution or torture hovering above her head - but it was to be the most disspiriting period of her life, as she observed at first hand the degradation of her own nation at the hands of those who had been entrusted to protect it.  Her name was Amalia Fleming (1912 - 1986) and for thirty-one days, she was interrogated at EAT ESA, the headquarters of the Greek military police’s Special Interrogation Center, as run by the infamous Major Theodoros Theophyloyannakos. What followed was a showdown between integrity and sadism as Theophyloyannakos applied every means he could, shy of direct torture, to break Fleming’s will and make her betray her friends, while Fleming stayed resolutely true to her principles, her country, and the people in her life whom she loved. The steadfastness of her loyalty is perhaps traceable to a life always spent slightly on the outside, looking in on worlds in which one doesn’t entirely belong, grateful for every connection formed, and consequently more defensive of, and steadfast towards, the objects of those connections. Amalia Koutsouri was born in 1909 or 1912 in Constantinople to a Greek dermatologist of solidly middle class status, but in 1914 the family had to flee the country in the wake of the ever more Turk-centered ethnic policy of the Ottoman Empire. Returning to Greece, she followed her father into medicine in spite of her own early predilection for philosophy, graduating from the University of Athens in 1938 as a bacteriology specialist.  In 1941, the Axis powers invaded Greece, and Amalia and her husband joined the Resistance, helping to procure fake identification for Allied soldiers, Greek resistance fighters, and Jews being persecuted by the occupiers, moving resistance radio equipment around from location to location in potato sacks to keep them out of Axis hands, and hiding refugees in the house she had inherited from her aunt. Her name was soon tortured out of one of her colleagues in the resistance, and in November 1941 she started her six month term in Averoff Prison, with the constant threat of execution if she did not provide information about her associates.  She refused to give up her knowledge about the resistance, and through some miracle, perhaps because of her relatively high position in society, she escaped being tortured by the occupiers to compel her to talk. By war’s end, her marriage was effectively over, and her years of devoting all her time and resources to the Resistance cause meant the knowledge she had learned for her degree was outdated, affecting her ability to resume normal life as a bacteriologist unless she brushed up her education. This she did, winning a scholarship to study in London, where beginning in 1946 she took up work at St. Mary’s Hospital’s Inoculation Department while researching in the laboratory of Alexander Fleming (1881-1955), who was at the time a world scientific celebrity on account of his 1928 discovery of penicillin, which gave the world its first broadly effective and mass produceable antibiotic.  In 1947, thanks to funding provided to Fleming by the American philanthropist Ben May, Amalia was able to purchase a phase-contrast microscope for her research. This type of microscope was invented in the early 1930s by Frits Zernike using optical elements produced by the factory of Dr. Caroline Bleeker, and was such a game changer in optical research that Zernike was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1953 for its development. Amalia used the phase-contrast microscope in her studies on bacterial resistance to antibiotics which resulted in the publication of some nine academic articles over the space of five years, including a report on best practices for preparing bacteria to harness phase-contrast technology, and studies on how resistance to antibiotics can be gained, lost, and regained based on what chemicals or environmental conditions the bacteria are exposed to and what other bacteria they are mixed with. Her later research, on S. aureus , extended these studies to see how traits caused by chemical agents were or were not transmitted across generations, providing evidence for which agents worked through genetically altering their target bacteria, preventing them from producing key proteins. Alexander and Amalia In 1951, Amalia returned to Greece, where she became head of the bacteriology department at Evangelismos Hospital, and used her fluency with language to become Alexander Fleming’s interpreter and guide during his European lecture tours. Fleming’s wife had died in 1949 and he found himself falling in love with Amalia, proposing to her in November of 1952. She accepted in spite of a 31 year age gap, and the pair were married on April 9, 1953. Because of Alexander’s constant travels outside the country for lecturing, re-entry into England for Amalia was a consistent difficulty requiring interminable refreshing of visas, so she decided to obtain dual citizenship in England and Greece, a status which would prove a double-edged sword to her in years to come. Alexander died of a heart attack on March 11, 1955, and for the next two years Amalia, like many of the figures we have studied in this series who were married to famous scientist husbands, gave up her own research in order to organize Alexander’s papers and arrange for a scientific monograph of his life and work to be published. After this, she began the long process of relocating to Greece, spending more months each year in Athens and fewer in London until, by 1967, she became a permanent resident once again of her home country. Fatefully, just over a month after having permanently resettled herself in Athens, the country fell into the clutches of the Regime of the Colonels, a military dictatorship ushered in by a coup, and kept in power until 1974 through the ruthlessness of its secret police force. Amalia, as heedless for her own safety as she had been in 1941, devoted herself to providing resources to the families of those who were targeted by the regime. This was enough to bring her to the attention of the authorities, but they largely let her continue her personal acts of aid to the persecuted until she involved herself in the plans to free Alexandros Panagoulis from the prison where he was being held for his 1968 attempt to assassinate junta head Georgios Papadopoulos. Word had reached her that he was being regularly and brutally tortured by his jailers, and so she formed a plan with friends of his to break him free from prison in late August of 1971.  That attempt failed, and Amalia was arrested for her suspected role in the plot. Once again, her status, both in society (she had been awarded the Order of Beneficence in 1965), and as a holder of British citizenship, kept her from the more overt torture applied to her co-conspirators, but she could hear their screams of agony from her own holding cell, and was regularly denied water, privacy, sleep, and sanitation in the month-long attempt to get her to reveal details about resistance to the regime. Her chief interrogator was the feared Theodoros Theophyloyannakos, who was known throughout the capitol for the ferocity of his technique, which included inserting wire into the urethra of his victims and then heating it with flames while inserted. Genital brutality, foot lashing, and repeatedly bashing victims’ heads against the concrete floor were part of his regular toolkit, but with Amalia he had to change tactics, alternating between honeyed attempts to lure her to the government’s side, including offers of ministerial positions, and day-long rants that if she did not comply, everybody she knew who was in his custody would be rounded up and tortured in front of her.  Guards would bang on her doors at regular intervals to keep her from sleeping, she was denied regular access to the lavatory, lights were kept on at all times, and her access to water was regulated and restricted in spite of her diabetic status. She was regularly fed false tales about friends who had informed on her, and of stories in the newspapers which painted her as a traitor to the nation. She lost weight, and her health suffered until she was urinating almost pure blood on the eve of her public trial. Finally, after thirty-one days of threat and interrogation, she had her trial, and was sentenced to prison for sixteen months in Korydallos Prison.  Here, though she requested to be jailed with the political prisoners, she was instead placed with the regular criminals, so that her wing mates included a number of murderers in the mix. Still, compared to her time under the eye of Theophyloyannakos, Korydallos represented something of an idyll. She could turn her light on and off at will. Her toilet was functioning and carried sewage away instead of letting it sit and fester. She was no longer being regularly questioned or psychologically tormented. And her fellow prisoners soon formed a close community who looked to her for guidance. Her time at Korydallos, however, was to prove limited, as her doctors and lawyer convinced the government that her health was in a perilous enough state to warrant allowing her to return home, recover, and serve the rest of her sentence later. Amalia’s return home was greeted with joy throughout Athens, and a picture of her reunion with her beloved but affronted cat made the international rounds. Back at home, she soon suffered an attack of angina and was no sooner ordered to remain in bed and rest than officials from the government entered her house and told her that they were taking her away for questioning, then instead drove her to the airport, where she was physically forced to board a plane for London. She told the authorities who had made the decision to deport her that they were making a terrible decision, that in Greece she would have to stay quiet about all she knew and thought of the regime, but that if deported to England, she would never stop trying to bring the plight of Greece to the attention of the Western powers which had, so far, turned a blind eye to the military junta because it was politically expedient to do so. Amalia returns home to her beloved cat, who is having none of it. The government didn’t listen, and Amalia Fleming was duly deported, and from the moment she hit the ground in London, she began her campaign to educate the public about the horrors being perpetrated in Greece under the name of public order and lawfulness, including her own memoir about her time in prison, A Piece of Truth , published in 1973. The following year the junta fell after the Turkish invasion of Cyprus caused a definitive break between different factions of the junta, leading to the restoration of parliamentary democracy. Fleming returned to Greece shortly thereafter, and was elected three times to the Greek Parliament - in 1977, 1981, and 1985, and though she was no longer actively engaging in research, she was a driving force behind the creation of the Athens Biomedical Sciences Research Centre Alexander Fleming, which ultimately saw the light of day in 1997, just over a decade after her death. Amalia Fleming died on February 26, 1986. Had she just been the bacteriologist who employed new optical technologies to probe the world of bacterial resistance to antibiotics, and who ensured the collection and preservation of the work of Alexander Fleming, she would more than have deserved her spot in our memories, but that she was on top of all of that, a fierce defender of freedom against tyranny and fascism, who put her beliefs into practice at the cost of her own health and psychological well-being, makes her an example of intellectual and political bravery whose story we not only should be telling, but must be telling, if for no other reason than to remind ourselves of what one person of principle can do when faced with a towering, brutal, but fundamentally weak government attempting to seize a nation away from its people.  FURTHER READING:  Fleming’s story is one of many contained in Whitaker and Barton’s invaluable Women In Microbiology (2018), but if you want the full story of what she experienced during the dark years of the Regime of the Colonels, you should really flag down a copy of A Piece of Truth . It is an important and eloquent eye-witness account of the worst abuses of that era, and an inspiring story of how steadfastness before tyranny can operate, with her accounts of her verbal jousts with Theophyloyannakos in particular demonstrating how the techniques of fascism fall apart when faced with determined resistance.